


The Man They Called Menas

by alexgaretti



Category: Elder Scrolls, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Elder Scrolls Online
Genre: Atatar, Conspicuously Public Assassination, Crouching Pelin Hidden Badass, Cunning Plans, Cunning Stunts, Espionage, Gen, Magitech, Nenalata, Overly Complicated Plots, Seventy Dead Goats, Showbusiness, War, ayleids
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-21
Updated: 2016-03-07
Packaged: 2018-05-22 02:12:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 24,054
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6066747
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alexgaretti/pseuds/alexgaretti
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Be quick, be clever, be strong, and if you can't be those then at least be lucky. Even the lesser people can get lucky." - <em>Sergeant Menas of Imperial Legion IV the Empress's Own, also known as the "Lucky Fourth"</em>.</p><p>The story of how the first Menas to bear the name wound up in the Heartlands of Cyrodiil.</p><p>It is the year 1E 42. A brutal religious war has divided the Ayleid States of Cyrodiil for a generation. Now one elite soldier is in the very heart of enemy territory on a covert mission to end the fighting and bring her great glory. For two years she and the best minds in her city have worked to bring down the ruler of their neighbour and enemy state. Her blade is sharp, her plan is flawless, her Will is strong.</p><p>But even the greatest scheme is only as good as its weakest link, and she has staked the lives of everyone in the Nibenay on one stocky brown-haired human from a place she's never heard of.</p><p>(Set about 200 years before the events of <em>ALSS: Nenalata</em>, during the last great war between the Ayleid states before the slave revolt.)</p><p>COMPLETED</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Phase One

**Author's Note:**

> A little background to the events and people in this fic can be found [here](http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Ayleid_Survivals_in_Valenwood).

‘You mean… _Impractical_?’

‘No…’ the well-furnished older lady with the loud eyeshadow said, ‘I said “less practical”. I want your armour to be less relentlessly fucking practical, yes?’

She had a voice like a fig cake making its way through a very expensive vat of treacle. It and her apartment were at odds with their surroundings. While the décor screamed success and wealth in a somewhat self-made way (too many colours on too many ceramics, too many tassles on too many cushions, too much in general) Lilanile had had to fight her way up a crowded, dusty tenement stairway from a communal courtyard in the Lower City. Although there were silks across the windows they could not keep the sound of honeycake hawkers and market carts from the close little room in which she and her agent were sat; Myranwe behind a badly-carved teakwood desk, Lilanile trying not to slide off yet more silk cushions.

Where everything in the room including its occupant was rounded, stuffed and loud Lilanile was lean and tall: an import from another world, which in a way she was. Myranwe hadn’t bothered to conceal her triumph when Lilanile hadn’t realised the silver statues in the cramped corridor were votives; she remarked with a fruity cackle how surprised she was that this aristocrat had never seen silver shrines before. Lilanile was too well-brought up to say how unspeakably vulgar it was; a truly noble House’s votives were so old they would have to be terracotta. Now the meeting proper was underway, she was trying and failing to understand how Myranwe’s mind worked about yet another thing.

‘But… It’s armour. It’s there to do a job, both mundane and spiritual. It is my tie to my Ancestors.’

‘Listen – darling…’ Myranwe reached for a glass of greenish tipple with a weary hand. ‘You are extremely talented. If you were not extremely talented I would not be sat here, banging my head against the brick wall that is your naivety, but… The Hunt is a _business_ , darling. You’ve got to understand that. And let me tell you, the business is distinctly unhealthy these days. It is not a seller’s market when it comes to getting a gig. Do me a favour, do yourself a favour – Spirits, do everyone in the city a favour – and make a few changes, yes?’

If you are going to tell a lie, make sure it is at least ninety per cent true, the Commander had said. Lilanile was beginning to understand why. Her face crumpled uncontrollably at the thought of her father, and of the great white mansion with the cool fountains, and of her home city, all very far away and distant now.

‘You don’t understand,’ she muttered at her feet. ‘My first memory is of my father saying the incantations over every feather and every link in that lorica. Then he knelt and –'

‘Great!’ Myranwe barked, waving a hand across the air in front of Lilanile’s face, picking up a pen, ‘Great. This is fabulous colour, darling, wonderful backstory. “The Mad Monk”. “The Avenging Angel”. No: “The Lady of Doom”! Just let me write it down.’

‘Then… Can I keep it?’

‘Well, of course. It’s your unique selling point. But you’ll still need to sort of…’ Myranwe hefted her free hand up and down in front of her matronly bosom, ‘Pep it up a bit.’

‘But then it isn’t my armour! It isn’t my ancestors’ armour! It won’t be real.’

‘Look darling, none of it’s real,’ Myranwe snapped. She slammed a drawer open beside her and for a moment Lilanile thought she might be reaching for a blade; it was an alit-skin fan instead. The older woman began to flap it vigorously in front of her face, wafting a stale leathery smell at Lilanile. ‘It’s the Hunt,’ she went on, grabbing the glass again. ‘It’s showbusiness. But I’m telling you, if you want to get in on the real stuff, the big money, the nasty fights, this is the kind of thing they’re looking for.’ She knocked the last of the green liquid back. The icecubes inside tinkled incongruously.

‘When I said I wanted to fight…’ Lilanile felt the sinews in her arms flex as she clutched the arms of her chair, and she bit her lip until she felt it tear, but it was no use: she had certain standards and they must be maintained. ‘I am a Pelin. When I fight the violence is an extension of my soul. So is my armour.’

‘I know, and it’s _lovely_. I’m just saying that it’s not very exciting, yes? Listen,’ Myranwe sighed, making a great show of being patient. She slid out from behind the desk and perched on the end of it, waggling one slipper on the end of her long toes. ‘Do you know what the Ordinator said about the last girl I showed him?’ Lilanile shook her head. ‘“Myranwe,” he said – we go back a long way – “Myranwe, I just want to tie her to a chair and never let her leave my office!” Where is she now? On every hoarding in the Lower City.’

Lilanile’s nose wrinkled: she had never been taught to keep her thoughts to herself. ‘The Lower City?’

‘Oh, what? You’re too good for the Lower City, now, are you? Darling, I don’t know if you noticed but _you don’t have a job_. I took you on because you told me you wanted to make it in the Hunt. A certain type of angsty aristocrat like you turns their nose up at these neighbourhood dogfights, but I’m telling you: they’re real Hunters. That’s where we all learned our tricks, darling, no matter how arty-farty we are now.’

Lilanile was trapped in a box and she knew it. There was a fine line between putting up a credible fight against what was a dishonourable and undignified position for a Pelin of noble blood to find herself in and on the other hand protesting too much. She needed to seem as if she genuinely had no other option but this ghastly walking clotheshorse and the barbaric Atatar Hunt. She twisted her hands together in her lap and bit her lip harder; it was bleeding now.

‘What do you want me to do to myself?’ she muttered.

‘I don’t want you to do anything you aren’t comfortable with, darling, you know that, so don’t say it like that. Just…’ Myranwe cocked her head on one side and considered her protégé with a professional eye. ‘Maybe cut your hair, something that frames your face a bit. Put on a bit of eye makeup, just for the crowds to see you from the cheap seats, you know? And then –' Myranwe tugged at Lilanile’s tunic until her pectoral muscles were exposed. ‘You’re built like a stevedore, sweetheart, so you need all the help you can get. Can’t we get rid of that bit of the armour? Show some dumplings?’

‘I thought I was there to fight,’ Lilanile growled. ‘Fighting to me is a sacred art. My armour is no less a part of that than the shroud of a priest. The Spirits and my ancestors –'

Myranwe flung her hands up in the air and rolled her eyes. ‘And we’re back to the Spirits and the ancestors! When people come to a Hunt they aren’t there to admire the technicalities, sweetie. In fact they don’t give a rat’s arse about the footwork or the feints or any of that shit. They want heroes and villains. They want anti-heroes and anti-villains. But above all they need each and every one of them to be – in their own way – fuckable. I’m just asking you to provide a high-quality family afternoon out, or why should they give you or me any money?’

Lilanile’s brilliant, cold eyes gave Myranwe a glare so piercing, so caustic it could have stripped the silver gilt off those votive statues in the corridor.

‘Well,’ Myranwe sighed, apparently not intimidated, ‘Let’s start with a few small things for now. Fix your hair, lovey, and we’ll talk again after the next engagement.’ Lilanile slammed her palms down on the arms of her seat and stood up to leave, but Myranwe held out a dense piece of text at her.

‘Last thing: you need to sign a contract if you’re serious about working with me. I have terms, you’ll find them all on that piece of paper; take them away, read them, but you won’t find better. A few things to note up front: I take forty percent, to be taken from the engagement fee and then topped up with the completion fee. You aren’t guaranteed work, but you can turn things down too. And if you get hooked up I can tell you to dump them if it doesn’t fit with your image. Above all – no babies. Got it?’

Lilanile looked down at the piece of paper with venom. ‘I swore a vow on my honour and my Ancestors to protect my Aran as he protects his people, unwavering and to the death. I forsook all other ties. I can’t have children. I can’t marry without his express permission.’

Myranwe leaned back into her chair and gave Lilanile a biting look down her long nose. ‘You’re really an Initiate?’ she asked suspiciously. ‘Are you one of those ones who can steal other people’s faces? Walk through walls? Destroy people’s minds?’ There were Initiates and Initiates, of course.

‘No,’ Lanile lied. That one had at least been short and simple.

‘Ha,’ Myranwe nodded, not looking any less suspicious. ‘What brings you here again?’

‘I was Exiled.’ Lilanile hung her head in sorrow, just as she had been practicing since she set out to join the Hunt. ‘I allowed a family feud to distract me from my duty to my Aran and the laws of his State. I was cast out of the city and its territories, I was stripped of all rank and property, I was beaten by my comrades through the streets of Nenalata with horsewhips.’ She shuddered at the memories; however much of this was a lie those things had been very real.

‘So they did all this to you, and you still think you have to honour that vow you made?’

‘It’s a spiritual matter, between me and my ancestors. I don’t expect you to understand.’

Myranwe shook her head and made a little “tcha” sound. ‘Well, forgive me, sweetheart, if I tell you that you people are nuts and you give me the creeps. You give the ordinary citizens of Atatar the creeps. But that’s alright, because if we’re careful it’ll add to your mystique, just…’ The agent cast a wary eye up and down her client’s long, hard muscles. ‘No funny business, yes?’

 

Lilanile thought about death a great deal. She regarded herself as lucky in this way, since her life had given her the opportunity to make a study of something most mortals were only able to think about in the same way as the Spirits, if they could bring themselves to think of it at all. Lilanile not only had words for death and the many forms it could take but she also had a familiarity with it. It felt like home. She reminded herself as she walked through the jostling streets between the night market and Myranwe’s apartment that she probably had a very different experience of the Hunt pens for that reason. It was yet another lonely reality she lived with here in Atatar.

The maze of narrow streets spat her out abruptly onto a long plaza. On one side was a low row of shops with awnings; these were the book makers, the fight fixers and the agents’ runners. It was how she’d found Myranwe several weeks before. On another side were a series of sturdy gates set into a blank wall; these were the entrances to the different categories of pen. To a foreigner with no experience of the Hunt they weren’t self-explanatory. Animals were divided into “fire” and “air” pens, although that turned out to have nothing to do with objective qualities and everything to do with lower caste Atatache beliefs about the Spirits.

Then there were the slaves, arranged by increasing degrees of lethality. The more dangerous they got the more expensive they were to house, since the worst had to be kept in solitary confinement. But that was quite alright, Myranwe had explained: they were the quarries that people paid serious gold to see done in. The business model just about stacked up, she insisted.

Lilanile had spent a couple of months quietly dispatching wolves and boars and the like. Tonight she was making for the slave pens, however, and she had a very specific objective in mind.

The overseer on the door was human. From the colour of his hair and eyes she’d have laid money on him being Colovian.

‘I am engaged to fight in the Little Canals quarter tomorrow night,’ she said gravely. ‘I should like to inspect the quarry.’ The man nodded and got an underling to swing the heavy gates open. It was quite normal for professional hunters to come and take a look at who they might be facing in the future, and it was how the fight fixers picked the best matches. Then they’d buy the animal or slave, starve them, drug them or otherwise enrage them, and turn them loose to be brought down.

Once again she wasn’t telling a complete lie: combat was combat, even if it was questionable, and she owed it to her opponent and herself to study them and know them. It didn’t matter if they were the Aran of Atatar himself or a gnat. It was just the way it worked. Lose that and you become one of the beasts.

The pen was in fact ten sunken pits lined with high sky-steel fences. In them in various states of disease, distress and malnourishment were the sort of sorry recent imports you only saw at the docks back home, although all clearly had been fine specimens at one point. The Atatache took a pile-them-high attitude to the lives they bought and sold, clearly. Most were crowded towards the shade thrown by their respective pits; the sun was even fiercer here than it was further up the Niben. On the left were females, and on the right the males. Lilanile began to pace the high walkway between them, holding her breath against the stench of bodies and their waste.

Not a fur-skin; too obvious. Nothing too sickly, too hulking or too sour. You could tell just by looking at them if they were ill-tempered. Then she saw just what she had been looking for these last two weeks, slumped despondently against the far wall of the second pen. He had brown hair, brown eyes and a heavy frame. He looked like he could take some punishment and still function.

She flicked her fingers towards the pit and the overseer’s boy sprang to let her in. Pushing the other bodies out of her way, she grabbed the stocky man’s matted fringe, pulled his head back and looked up his nostrils, in his eyes, in either ear and then grabbed his mouth at the corners and looked inside. He had almost a full set of teeth: impressive. He watched all this with a sort of baffled expression, neither helping her nor hindering. If Lilanile had to give his attitude a description, she’d have called it laconic. She couldn’t help but smile that very grim, reserved Pelin smile to herself. This one had promise.

‘I can make him jump about a bit if you like,’ said the overseer behind her. ‘I know sometimes people like to see them move.’

‘That will not be necessary,’ Lilanile said solemnly. ‘I’ve seen everything I needed to.’

She took a deep breath, shut her eyes, and reached out with her Will to the fabric of Time. Everything beyond her body and that of the brown-haired human slowed until it no longer seemed to move.

She began to make her way through the human languages she knew. This would only work if they could communicate. Eventually his face flickered with recognition, and she began Phase Two of the Plan.

‘How would you like to see home again?’ Lilanile asked, in the Kreath dialect.

 

When he told this story later Menas would always have to check himself. In his memory the woman in practical armour was wearing boots up to the knee. Of course, he knew that no-one in Atatar wore boots like that, and the Pelinia of the Southern Nibenay most definitely didn’t. But somehow in his mind she should have been. It was something about the way she carried herself; an easy, elegant swagger, a controlled and beautiful menace. He’d have called it graceful, but it wouldn’t have looked any different on a man. But then the male Ayleids, the male Pelini in particular, they were nothing if not graceful… Oh, bollocks to it. She was poised, aloof, and clearly deadly. That was all that mattered to the story.

She asked him a series of one-word questions, none of which made any sense, until eventually she barked; ‘Kreath?’

Menas’ grandmother on his mother’s side had been from the Kreath, and he more or less understood the dialect. He hadn’t even meant to say anything but his eyes must have done the talking for him, because she continued.

‘How would you like to see home again?’

It was at that point that Menas realised that she’d done something to him. His vision was blurred and he felt like he was wrapped in a blanket which was muffling the rest of the world. But it could just have been that he hadn’t had a drop of water since yesterday.

‘Depends,’ he croaked. ‘What shape box are you sending me back in?’

To his great surprise the woman’s angular, bronze face began to smile. Sort of: a rough attempt at what on other people would be a smile. Menas also realised that it wasn’t him that had been altered, because the woman’s movements weren’t blurred. She’d done something to the _rest of the world_.

Oh Shor’s shit, thought Menas to himself, this is a whole new realm of lethal, even for this lot.

‘I like you, little pink one,’ she declared, letting go of his hair finally and stepping back to take a look at him. She nodded at what she saw. ‘Yes, you’ll do. Wait for my sign. You shall see the shrines and halls of your ancestors again before you die.’

And then she sort of disappeared. Or sort of reappeared somewhere else instantaneously, looking at the other prisoners’ teeth and fingernails and so on. One way or another she wasn’t wittering at Menas any more, and Menas’ sinuses jangled like they were made of iron and being struck by a hammer.


	2. Phase Two: Objective One

On the following Loredas Lilanile dispatched her first non-animal. Her strategy was straightforward: she should be good, but not too good. She would win each engagement, but not spectacularly in the first instance. What was required for this to work was a slow build, a slight suggestion that she was not quite your average brigand or low-life. She required word of mouth approval, teashop gossip, sugar-addled chatter. The very last thing this project needed was a meteoric rise and the wrong sort of attention too quickly. Myranwe was right in one way; popularity could provide a useful bulwark against suspicious priest and retainers.

The Hunt was a truly strange business to Lilanile because it all seemed so very unnecessary. Why turn something dangerous loose in a square in a crowded quarter of a major city, then go and mill about in it? It had not escaped her attention, however, standing in the heat and noise, smelling the inimitable scent of hot honey pastries, wine and day-old sweat that was a Nibenese working-class quarter at play, that Nenalata had its equivalent in its Vigyld sacrifice. But that was running a single man through the main thoroughfare on one day of the year; a symbolic gesture. This was merely boorish. And probably wasteful of lives and property alike.

But as she watched them loose the man on the square she couldn’t deny that it was exciting for exactly that sense of hazard. It was like jumping through a fire or poking a poisonous snake. She didn’t want to enjoy it, but she found it hard not to feel a primeval, reptilian thrill in a part of her she had learned to distrust.

As she stepped out of the shabby little tavern onto the flagstones the high tenements around the square seemed very far away, and the crowd roiled and lurched before her eyes. It could just have been the brandy they’d shoved into her hands before she left. A ripple in the Atatache flanks told her where the man had got to, the young men and women pushing him back and goading him with burnt sticks.

She gave him a straightforward death, much to the disappointment of the crowd. It was as much a mercy to herself as to him.

 

‘Predi!’ a fruity, well-upholstered voice shrieked from the upper window. ‘Predi!’

Lilanile had come to Myranwe’s apartment to collect her winnings, if you could really call them winnings. It implied there was the risk of losing.

‘SEPREDIA!’ Myranwe’s distinctive drawl rang out around the courtyard, and Lilanile braced herself for a trying morning.

As the door opened at the top of the bustling stair a little brown ball of fur came shooting out into the gloom. It was making an odd snarling, panting sound, and all Lilanile could say was that it was mammalian. Its overall texture and colour made her think of the human down in the pits.

‘Damn thing!’ Myranwe appeared from the gloom. She was dressed in a loose gown and had some sort of colourful towel wrapped around her hair.

‘What is that?’ Lilanile asked, regretting that she had left her sword in her lodgings.

‘Allegedly a fucking present, that’s what it is,’ Myranwe barked, more at the animal than at Lilanile. ‘A poo-machine! A devourer of choice cuts and soft furnishings! Forgive my state of attire, lovey,’ the agent said, lifting her hands limply with what appeared to be the last of her strength. ‘I can feel one of my crises coming on… Come in, darling, come in, help yourself to a drink or a nibble of something or whathaveyou.’

Lilanile found a small wrapping of gold in the dimly-lit all-purpose room that wasn’t the bedroom. It was really a very small wrapping.

‘Minus engagement fee, minus my cut, minus promotional materials, minus permits, just as we agreed.’

Lilanile couldn’t remember agreeing to half of that. ‘Even with those deductions I should expect to see more.'

‘Oh, would you?’ sneered Myranwe. ‘Well… I’d tell you that we’re at war, but that’s just business as usual these days.’

Myranwe flopped backwards onto a daybed and her silks fluttered after her. ‘ _Spirits_! All this shit about the Trade and the temples and whatever else. I wish they’d all grow up and admit that they’re only after the spice routes. Then we can all shut the fuck up and get on with it. Stop it getting in the way of my work. But…’ She wafted a wan hand at nothing in particular. ‘‘Tis the way of the world, and especially the way of those more powerful than you or I, my love. Who am I to question, and all that… Now! I see you haven’t cut your hair yet.’

Lilanile was still staring at the miniature amount of cash in her hand. She had a very unreasonably priced room to pay for. ‘I do not expect you to deduct penalties we have not agreed on.’

‘Listen,’ Myranwe said, hauling herself upright again, ‘As soon as you stop creating extra work for me, then you can tell me how much you get.’

‘Extra… What?’

‘Uninvited guests. People looking for you outside of normal business hours. People with a threatening demeanour and few social graces.’

And so it begins, Lilanile thought. She was oddly reassured by it. ‘Did they say who they were?’

‘Your cousins. But they reeked of incense. And money: priests.’

That night Lilanile put her sword through an interloper to her apartment in a very satisfying single sweep from a foetal position in bed. In lieu of better options she left the corpse in the stairwell. Then she slept the sweet sleep of the righteous soldier.

 

Menas had counted three days and two nights since his run-in with that witch with the big arm muscles. In that time most of the pit’s inmates had changed; new men were brought and some were taken away in ones and twos. Some fought, some wailed and screamed. Some seemed to just be happy that they were finally going to meet their fate.

Every evening they were brought food. Menas’ guess was that it was whatever was going cheap at the end of the market. There wasn’t much of it, some of it was rotten, and it was dumped in the middle of the pit. It reminded him of feeding livestock. He never got much of it; he’d decided that the quickest way to get his head bashed in was to swagger about like a bastard. He waited until the inevitable fight had broken out, then he picked at the edges.

That night had been different for him, however. The overseer’s boy had barked a word that sounded very much like “you” to him, pointed at him and crooked his finger. While the hotheads were scrapping for their lion’s share and getting nothing, Menas was eating bread, mutton and some kind of floppy white cheese. He wolfed it down, but he couldn’t help but suspect that he may as well be eating poison.

Lo and behold, that night Menas was visited by a ghost. He had thought long and hard about it in the years since and he still reckoned that his first instinct had been right: it was a ghost of a sort.

She appeared as the rest of the pit was lost in dreamless sleep. She was the size of a normal mortal – an Ayleid one, which is to say enormous – and perfect in every way except that she was totally translucent. Where her edges were turned towards Menas – the thin sides of her nose, the points of her ears, the sides of her shoulders – the glow of her outline multiplied into a cold blue light.

‘Do not be afraid –'

Menas sprang backwards and landed on his back. His brain rattled inside his skull, but he was too terrified to even feel it. He began screaming. The apparition’s face appeared against the night sky above him and scowled.

‘Stop that.’

To Menas’ alarm his throat stopped working. His lungs still filled with air, he could feel it pushing past his windpipe and straining in his voicebox, but no sound came out. That only made him scream harder.

‘Look at me –' Menas was alarmed to realise that he was indeed looking at the ghost, even though he was trying to close his eyes. ‘I am the Hunter who spoke with you two nights past.’

She was indeed the haughty Ayleid with the nasty smile. That did it: she was definitely a ghost. ‘You’re dead!’ Menas’ lips mouthed at her.

‘I am not dead. I am as alive as you are.’ The figure cocked an eyebrow and looked him up and down. ‘Perhaps more so. What you see is a projection of my soul and my Will, while my body remains anchored to…’ The spectre sighed and shook its head. Menas carried on screaming. Who cared if it was silent? It was helping. ‘Have you ever heard of the Psijic Monks of Artaeum?’ Menas shut his eyes and howled harder, to no effect.

‘Little man, if you do not stop screaming I shall have to take more drastic action. Time is short and I require something very specific of you. If we cannot reach an accommodation I shall have to kill you.’

That sounded like the sort of order you most definitely paid attention to.

‘Good. Sit up, talk quietly, and make no sudden movements. These things are harder for me to contain and we will be detected.’

Menas did as he was told and looked around him. She had done it again: time had been slowed to a near stop and the world about him had lost its brilliance. The colours were dimmer, the sounds very faint.

‘Tell me your name, little man,’ she barked.

‘Menas.’

The spectre’s lips twisted. ‘Not the name they gave you: your real name.’

‘My name is Menas,’ he replied hoarsely. ‘I will never tell you my real name.’

Looking back on it Menas liked to think that this was brave. It made for a nice defiant-sounding younger self full of principle and righteous fury at his suffering. Actually he was shitting himself and said whatever came into his head. It was profoundly stupid.

Rather than killing him on the spot the ghost raised an eyebrow and nodded solemnly at him. ‘I understand your insolence,’ she declared. ‘Were I in your position I would do likewise. You have my regard, little Menas.’

The outline of the Ayleid woman drew herself up to her full, towering height and declared to the stars more than to Menas, ‘My name is Pelin Lilanile Calinden of Morahame.’

There was silence for a few moments.

‘I’m sorry… Which part of that is your actual name?’

‘What?’

‘I don’t speak much Ayleidoon. It just sounded like a long sentence. Which bit was your name?’

‘All of it.’

There was another awkward silence.

‘You shall call me Calinden. It is my clan name.’ The woman’s ghost – or projection, as she insisted -started to pace the dusty floor of the pit. ‘You will have been fed properly tonight. That is because I have arranged for you to be purchased. It has been a carefully planned ruse, involving a false account at the money-lenders, a disguise of great cunning and no small amount of hazard on my part.’

Menas could feel the pain now in his skull. He took that as a good sign; his body was coming back to life.

‘But why did you buy me?’

The woman smiled one of her bewitching, unsettling, clever smiles at Menas. ‘Because I am here to execute an important mission, and in every plan of this scale and audacity there will always be unknowns… But - ah!’ she exclaimed ruefully. ‘We have a whole language for speaking of these things, you understand, whole corridors of scholars who debate them. Alas, in the tongue of the men of Kreath… I think the idea of the known unknown does not loom so large.’

‘Probably not,’ Menas admitted.

‘We may call these things moving targets, things one must rely upon to happen for other things to go as they must. But every great plan must also ensure that there are things that are fixed targets. And if there is one thing that is constant in every time and place, it is that a slave who has been marked for death will want to escape, and have no love of his captors.’ The woman was still smiling at Menas as she finished her sentence, and her nasty eyes were blazing at him with conspiratorial glee.

‘And I’m that… Hold a minute,’ Menas spluttered, ‘What do you mean, “marked for death”?’

‘Little man, you are here because you are to be set loose in some theatre of combat and pursued to your end by a champion for the amusement of the crowd. If you were not so marked you would already have been sent to the silver mines, never to see the sun or breathe fresh air again. There you would toil beneath the earth until you died, whether from hunger, thirst or deprivation of sunlight, your back bent double, your hair –'

Menas wasn’t interested in hearing the alternative grizzly ends he might have met: the one he was guaranteed was looming too large. ‘A theatre of combat? What does that mean?’

‘The Atatache – the Ayleidoon who live here – are great lovers of bloodsports. The humble enjoy seeing their little squares and market arches turned into arenas for animals, men and their pursuers to fight to the death inside. The great use parks or gardens in their estates. The Aran himself has a pavilion in such a park in the grounds of the Palace. From there he and his consort and his courtiers can watch the kill no matter where it happens. The lesser people of the court must crowd around the walls, so I believe.’

‘So you believe?’

‘Where I come from, we do not have such a tradition. I have trained for the last two years to enter the Hunt, as they call it here, at the very bottom and work my way to the top: tracking, hand-to-hand combat, traditional stealth and stalking techniques and, probably most important of all, rudimentary medical training. I learned the basics of eleven human languages that I might make contact with you. I severed all my ties to my old life and I came here a penniless pauper. All with the sole aim of becoming the supreme champion of the Atatar Hunt so I might perform before Aran Glinferen himself.’ Those eyes flashed again in the otherworldly half-light.

‘And you!’ The woman spun around and jabbed one of her slightly-too-long fingers at Menas. ‘You will survive every Hunt you are in from now on – I shall see to it. You shall become the most feared and ferocious warrior the Atatache have ever encountered. But we are getting ahead of ourselves,’ she smiled, ‘Let us see how you perform in tomorrow’s little dogfight, and then we shall resume our conversation.’

Menas stared up at the ghost above him. She was very tall, very strong and effortlessly graceful. She was the creepiest thing he’d ever seen.

‘Do you always talk like this?’

‘Talk like what?’

‘Like a lavender-scented polecat crawled up your arse.’

The woman’s eerily pale silver eyes blinked a couple of times. This was not how men spoke to their masters, but then Menas was not exactly a domestic slave. He was basically feral, she reasoned. Compassion should be shown. ‘This is not my first language.’

‘It’s not mine either. All the more reason why I don’t tie myself in knots with it.’

‘But…’ The woman’s bronze face was as blank as a mask as ever, but now she seemed genuinely lost rather than shrouded in mystery. ‘But you speak the language of the Kreath. You are a warrior of the Kreath.’

‘Nah,’ Menas shook his head. ‘You just assumed that. My granny’s from the Kreath.’ Menas checked himself. ‘Was from the Kreath.’

‘Then where are you from?’

‘Place called Nonwyll, just north of Hrotanda Vale. At least during the winter. My family looked after the goats for a Master up there. Followed them about in the Highlands.’

There would come a point in the not-too-distant future when Lilanile would regard this as her first significant mistake. For now, she wanted to make the best of the situation.

‘But for you to find yourself sold down the Niben… To find yourself in the slave pits, awaiting the Hunt as quarry… You must have done something beyond the usual, Menas. You must be capable of great brutality for your captors to fear you so.’

Menas couldn’t help but laugh bitterly at that. ‘Fear? You must be kidding.’

The tall, proud woman shrugged with an easy confidence. ‘Of course, fear. Why is that so strange? I am one of the most dangerous things you will ever meet, Menas, and I am afraid of many things. What else do you put in a cage but one you fear?’

‘Something you want to seem more impressive than it is,’ Menas said, squinting into the bright moonlight, ‘So that when you kill it you feel extra powerful?’ The woman’s lips curled into a sneer of acknowledgement.

‘So tell me, little pink Menas,’ she insisted, ‘Tell me what you have done to incur the wrath of the Ayleidoon so.’

‘It’s a long story,’ the stocky, sunburnt man said, pulling himself to his feet, ‘And it involves goats.’

‘Goats?’

‘Every summer a band of nutters from north of the mountains came down to raid the hill farms. This year me and my cousin decided we’d had enough. We let them come right into our camp then we set fire to them; tipped a bucket of dripping on them from a tree and set them alight. Next day, more of the bastards turn up and do the same thing but to our goats. Two days after that, Lord Uriil’s guards show up at my folks’ house and tell us that unless we can compensate him the price of seventy goats they’re taking us and selling us to the highest bidder… Turns out old Uriil of Hrotanda really loved his goats.’

Menas smiled, but he wasn’t sure why. It hadn’t been funny and thinking about it didn’t bring him anything but pain.

 

When he was led through the streets he got his first real look at the city. It was big, and it was crowded, and it clearly had wealth somewhere, but it wasn’t covered in gold or full of shining crystals like the peddlers’ tales had claimed. The buildings were taller than anything else Menas had ever seen, and bronzed, brown Ayleid faces seemed to spill out of every crack in them. They laughed, ate, sang, gossiped and jeered at him. Every now and again someone would risk jabbing him in the ribs. It took nearly the whole miserable march to the vast open marketplace for him to realise they wanted to see him start on them.

No-one gave him a weapon. Not that Menas really knew how to use a sword or axe or anything actually useful, but a knife could have been a nice gesture. But he was not the hunter today, the Calinden woman had told him; he was the prey.

When they flung him into the middle of that bleached, sunbaked square he had stood there like a little boy lost in a forest. It was clear to him there was nothing to do and nowhere to run to. This seemed to disappoint the crowd. Every now and again a young man would run up to him and poke him with a stick. Sometimes the sticks were alight, and they would swing them at his shins. He had no choice but to jump when that happened, which made the crowd a bit happier and encouraged more young men to come and poke him. Eventually he didn’t jump high enough and the fiery wood collided with his leg, sending him hopping and howling in circles. The crowd erupted into cheers and the young man responsible swaggered back to his friends.

He was hot, tired and sore by the time they loosed the lizard on him. He had never seen anything like it; it ran on two legs and was the size of a large dog. It had an unnaturally big head and a row of perfect, white, triangular teeth. Menas had no option but to run at that point.

The crowd parted before him as he sped towards them, and at first he thought they were taking pity on him. Then he realised that they were letting him run wherever he wanted. They wanted to enjoy the way he tried to outrun his pursuer, or hide from it, or stand and fight; whatever he wanted to do, they would let him do it.

Hiding seemed like a very good option. He picked the darkest little passage off the square and dove into it.

There was a large grille across the passageway about thirty feet along, specially made to fit tightly to the uneven walls. Menas was trapped.

The people who lived in the huge houses above him cooed with delight that they were being given ringside seats for the kill. There was some kind of tavern or eatery on the corner with a terrace on its first floor: this crowded with people too, all straining to get a look.

Menas could feel his heart shake his entire body. There was nothing left but panic, and no dignity left to preserve. He began scrabbling at the loose plaster on the buildings. He had no idea why: he was like a rat caught in a sack.

The crowd at the far end shrieked and roared, Menas turned and he saw the lizard thing explode through the wall of bodies. Saliva was hanging off its pointed teeth and spattering the ground as it tore towards him. One step followed another step, and Menas held up his forearms before his eyes –

‘Stand up.’

Menas bent himself double, bracing himself against the grille for the lizard’s blow.

‘Stand up, Menas.’

The impact never came. All Menas could feel was his heart hammering on his ribs and the blood coursing through his veins.

‘Menas, stand up and fight.’

He raised his head to find out where the lizard had gone to. His guts lurched to see it at the other end of the passageway. Then he realised that the crowd had stopped cheering. In fact, the world was utterly silent. The creature was caught in mid-run as if it had been stuffed and mounted. All the Ayleids around him were the same.

‘Menas, I told you I would ensure that you would survive. So stand up and look at me.’

Menas strained his eyes and looked around for where the voice had come from. It sounded impossibly close, only a whisper, but he knew that there was no-one near enough to do that.

Then he saw her, tall even among these tall people, her black hair shrouded with a plain linen scarf like a priest, standing on the balcony of the tavern. Her eyes almost seemed to glow from the shadows of her veil and her face.

‘There are powerful forces at work in our world, little Menas,’ the woman whispered down at him, ‘And every Atatache in this square believes you to be one of them. I believe you to be one of them.’

‘I what – I don’t –‘ All Menas could see was that crazed lizard thing coming so very slowly towards him. All he could think of was its jaws.

‘You ask me what I mean? You are the fist and blade of Lorkhan, little man. That is why these people fear you.’

Menas looked up at her, and said his second stupidly brave thing of the day. ‘So why don’t you fear me?’

‘I do, in my way, but I was taught to master these fears, to bend these forces to my Will.’

‘Your will?’

‘No: my Will.’ The woman cast her eyes towards the beast. ‘He approaches. As do the Aran’s Pelinia: I must go.’

Menas looked at the loose, scaly skin around the creature’s haunches and throat; it flopped grotesquely as it made its slow way towards him. Menas had wrung chicken necks before. How different could it be? He stepped into the path of the beast and stretched out his hands to fasten onto its gizzard. There was a strange, long moment in which its unblinking eye closest to him seemed to flicker with recognition at what was about to happen. Then Menas twisted the vertebrae against one another like he’d been doing it all his life.

The crack of its spine seemed to break whatever trance the world was under. The scaly creature’s body slammed into his own, Menas was sent careening onto his back, and the crowd went wild.


	3. Phase Two: Objective Two

The next time the Ayleid Calinden dropped in on Menas in his pit, she came in person. She also came in a full set of burnished gold armour made out of hundreds of hawk-like feathers.

‘I come fresh from combat,’ she explained.

Menas gestured to the talons and feathers that covered the woman’s feet and wrists with a mutton bone. ‘I didn’t think it was your nightie.’

The world was silent about her as usual, but she was tired; Menas could tell because things were moving a little faster than usual. Even she had her limits, then.

‘You seem… calmer,’ she observed. ‘I had worried that my body passing through the perimeter walls might have alarmed you.’

‘After yesterday, nothing is ever going to surprise me or frighten me again.’

The woman’s lips curled at the corner. ‘I applaud your mettle, little man. You are wrong, of course, but I applaud you all the same.’

Menas offered the woman some of the wobbly white cheese in its muslin wrapping. She peered in, grimaced, but shook her head politely.

‘So. Are you going to explain why I’m your new pet human?’

The Calinden woman nodded and smiled indulgently. ‘You, little Menas, are my key to the door out of Atatar.’

‘Am I now?’

She cocked her head on one side and braced her hands behind her back, and Menas knew that he was in for a lengthy and incredibly smug exposition. When he told this story in the future he sometimes left this bit out.

‘In the years prior to the refounding of the Temple of the Ancestors, a bitter schism emerged between the city states of Cyrod –' Here the Calinden woman paused, took a wary look at Menas and asked, ‘Do you know that word: "schism"?’

‘Nope,’ said Menas.

The woman frowned. ‘Hmm,’ she said, as if disappointed but not surprised. ‘Have you ever heard of Narfinsel?’

‘Nope.’

‘The Ancestors?’

Menas squinted a bit. ‘Vaguely…’

‘Anyway,’ the Ayleid woman boomed, refolding her hands carefully and resuming her gaze into the distance, ‘Let us not get distracted by dispute and history. What cannot have escaped your notice is that a great war rages around you.’

Menas looked about. He could see the high wall of the pit. Above that he could see some palm fronds swaying in the evening breeze like deep green flags. Had time not stopped he could have heard what he assumed was a pretty normal evening in a large city, although he’d never spent the evening in a large city: Hrotanda was little more than a mining hold.

‘Does it?’

‘ _It does_ ,’ the woman hissed, glowering at him with those eerie silver eyes of hers. Menas wasn’t sure if they were just surprisingly pale for someone of that complexion or if they actually glowed faintly.

‘My home city is at war with this one. I am not a mere pit fighter, little man. At home I am the daughter of a great noble House, and I am one of the closest companions of our King; one of an elite bodyguard trained in the ancient arts of war, both mundane and transmundane. And I am here to put a stop to this war; I am here to assassinate the leader of this city, Aran Glinferen. My entire life here is a ruse to perform for him at a Royal Hunt, surrounded by all his city. Then I shall kill him with a single blow!’

‘Wait, wait, wait!’ Menas shouted, scrabbling to his feet. ‘You are going to walk into the middle of the Royal Hunt, watched by all of Atatar, surrounded by the city’s elite bodyguard, pull your sword out in front of all of them, kill their King –'

‘Aran.’

‘- Kill their Aran, slice out his still-beating heart or something, kill everyone else presumably, and then walk out of here and… what? _Go home_?’

The faintest, tiniest suggestion of a proud and excited sneer troubled the woman’s lips. ‘I am.’

Menas was rarely speechless. Never, in fact. From that day until the day he died he was never at a loss for a smart remark. That one moment, however, he had nothing safe or sensible to say.

‘You’re a fucking lunatic.’

‘With great audacity comes great hazard, little pink one,’ the woman said quietly. There was a note of exhilaration in her voice Menas did not like one bit.

‘And I’m doing this with you?’

‘If you wish to live. If you did not wish to live you should have made a different choice. If you no longer wish to live I shall kill you here now, because you know too much.’

Menas realised that had been the answer to a completely different question. ‘I’ll say it again: I’m somehow involved in this now? Why would you tell me that you’re going to kill King Aran –'

‘No: _Aran Glinferen_. King Glinferen in this tongue. _Aran_ is his title.’

‘Sorry. _Aran Glinferen_ …’ Menas’ tongue wrestled with the vowels like he had a hot potato in his mouth. ‘Why tell me that? Seems a rash thing for an assassin to do. And why do you need me at all if you’re going to kill him with a single blow?’

‘Because one does not simply stab such a target and watch him bleed to death. He is a powerful sorcerer. For the last two years the greatest inventors and scholars of my city have researched how this might be done. They have created such a weapon, but I cannot carry it into the enclosure with me; the Aran’s bodyguard will detect it on me as I am presented to him. Similarly, I need to plant an explosive device at the foot of the walls in order to punch my way out to the countryside beyond once I have completed my objective. I will not have time to do that and target the Aran. So on that day you will carry the explosive for me.’

Now he saw it. Now reality had dawned on him. ‘And explode as well, I take it.’

‘Ah!’ the Ayleid woman gasped theatrically, ‘It is not that sort of an explosion. It will cause a disturbance in the fabric of the walls, but not on a mundane level. Then we run for the border: the Panther River, Welke, Dynar’s estates, and freedom!’

Menas had no idea what anything had meant apart from the last part. He liked it. He liked it better than the silver mines anyway.

‘What about the weapon? How do you get that inside?’ he asked.

‘This is the truly cunning part,’ the woman insisted, holding a finger aloft. ‘We have created many identical varla stones which could all carry the charge necessary to kill transform them into the weapon. For the next month a false trading company we have formed in Atatar will install these specially modified varla stones as the Royal Park is renovated. On my one and only tour of the enclosure prior to the final Hunt I shall leave the charge concealed within a small urn that the gardener has been given as a gift from his mistress – also one of our operatives – and retrieve it once the engagement is underway. I will be able to use any one of seven varla stones at various intervals around the royal park, whichever comes first to hand. Then, when no ordinary person would have the audacity to try, I shall kill him before his entire city and make my escape!’

To Menas’ ears it sounded as if this was the pause for raucous clapping from an enraptured audience. Since there was only him there, however, it was all a bit awkward.

‘You don’t think that’s a bit… complicated, do you?’

‘Little pink one,’ the woman in practical armour smiled in that grim way of hers, ‘I have been charged with killing an Aran; the cousin of my liege lord the Aran of Nenalata; the seed and blood of the First King of Mer. This is no simple thing, no ordinary mission. I and my comrades have planned this with great care for two years; all is as it must and should be. He is virtually indestructible, but on his existence turns the fate of this war and all the souls of the Nibenay.’

‘Yeah, about this war,’ Menas began, ‘I still don’t fully get why –'

‘My Aran himself kissed my sword before my mission began,’ the woman went on, pacing gravely as she lost herself in her memories of home. ‘As he Exiled me he told me I could only redeem myself if I brought the blackened heart of the Aran of Atatar to him by Vigyld next.’ The woman’s lean, befeathered hand curled into a claw as she imagined it clamped around the offending organ.

‘So that’s your cover story: you were banished?’

She nodded. ‘For killing my brother.’

Menas raised an eyebrow. ‘Well, it’s a good one, so long as they don’t have spies back in your city who find out the truth.’

‘No, pink one,’ the woman declared, still staring at the space between her outstretched fingers, ‘I did indeed kill him. How else could the plan have worked?’

Menas didn’t think that Ayleids went in for jokes much. He realised he had to take her at her word. Not only was this woman the deadliest thing he’d ever encountered, she was also clearly homicidally insane. So must be every last Ayleid in the entire world, he decided.

‘Fuu…’

Well, forewarned is forearmed.

‘Anyway… It’s still too complicated. I get that it’s tricky killing an Ayleid sorcerer-king –' Menas held out a hand to halt to the long speech she was about to repeat ‘- But that’s not the point. That’s about the means, not the method. All this faffing about with the stones and your fake business: just dump one or two somewhere and pick them up when you need them.’

The woman’s eyes narrowed and she studied Menas like an owl surveying a twilight field. ‘"Dump them”?’

‘Yeah. By the entrance to the enclosure.’

‘"Dump them”…’ the woman repeated.

‘You’re just leaving too many opportunities to get caught otherwise. There are too many moving parts. So dump it. By the entrance. Pick it up when you need to.’

The woman’s mouth opened and closed a couple of times.

‘I shall conceal one stone by the entrance of the enclosure,’ she announced gravely, ‘And retrieve it when necessary.’

‘I think that sounds like a cracking plan, ma’am.’

 

When Lilanile got back to her room two sealed letters had been slid under the door. One was from the landlord. He was writing to her to let her know that the families on the stairwell had woken up to another mutilated corpse that morning and that he knew it was her. This was a respectable boarding house and he would have to serve her notice if it happened a third time, although he thanked her for paying the next two months’ rent upfront. The other letter was from Myranwe.

 _Have you cut your hair yet?_ the note inside read.

 

 

Lilanile had decided to call Myranwe’s bluff and cut her hair with such savagery, such ferocity, that no-one could mistake it for anything other than the shearing-of-locks that went with deep Pelinia mourning of the most traditional and severe type. With the Menas man in hand (and newly furnished with a blade and upgraded to non-disposable by the arcane Hunt ranking system) it was time to escalate her own activities.

When she arrived at the neighbourhood tavern for her next engagement she was surprised by the welcome she got.

‘No,’ the tavern owner insisted. ‘You’re not her. Get out of here before you piss me off properly. Trying to mooch a brandy off me…’

‘I am her,’ Lilanile insisted. ‘Who else would I be? Look at what I’m wearing.’

The owner shoved a piece of paper at her and growled, ‘Exactly.’

Lilanile saw that what he was holding was a handbill with her name on it. Below that was an utterly unthreatening looking thin woman in what could only be described as a metal dress. Lilanile counted nine different fatal gaps in the armour before she gave up and stormed off to find one of the Hunt fixers. As she went she was horrified to see posters of herself everywhere. Well, not her exactly: an absurd and dysfunctional caricature of a Pelin. A mockery of her sacred art.

Eventually she found the fixer and they both went back to confront the tavern owner with the awful truth: that this really was Lilanile Calinden.

Perhaps it was that her opponent - a barbarian with a plaited beard - was genuinely rather good, or perhaps it was the rage she felt about the handbills. Either way, Lilanile allowed herself her first little sip at virtuosity that afternoon. She sliced straight through the stave of the giant axe they’d given him, but only after tumbling and leaping out of its way like an acrobat for half an hour.

Afterwards Lilanile felt more tired than she could remember having felt for a very long time. As she dragged her feet back up the hill to the rickety quarter she boarded in she tried to tell herself it was simply the effort of keeping that Menas man alive. One cannot rely on the Old Ways so intensively and not expect to feel drained.

Her heart told her that this was not the whole truth, however. It was also the indignities she was suffering: that poster, that agent, _these people_. Even Atatar was depressing. It wasn’t ugly, but it certainly wasn’t beautiful like Nenalata, or cosmopolitan and cultured. What she needed, she realised, was to take herself to the theatre and lose herself in a play, but all Atatar’s theatres seemed to show were endless bawdy comedies and schoolboy classics. Really she needed friends and wine and an evening putting the world to rights. She needed piped water in her lodgings, covered sewers and underfloor heating. She both wanted to stop thinking about her loneliness and her corrupt, disgraced brother and also to think long and deep and hard. Just not alone, for once.

Instead she took herself to the one consolation she had found in that nasty backwater; a teashop that did exceptionally good honey pastries. Even there those hateful posters stared down at her, but the tea was bright and refreshing and the cakes were excellent.

Her peace did not last long. A lad from the fixer’s office came in, saying he’d been looking for her everywhere, and that he had an urgent message.

‘ _Darling, you are FAMOUS!_ ’ shrieked the note. ‘ _You simply must come for a bottle of Abarata Reserve to celebrate. If your Ancestors will let you, of course. The bathhouse with the red awning at the Fiveways, sunset. PEOPLE want to meet you!_ ’

Lilanile looked up at the poster pasted to the teahouse portico, and those firm, ferocious breasts stared back. Someone is famous, she thought, but I’m not at all sure it’s me.

 

‘You see?’ Myranwe beamed, ‘You cut your hair, you cheer the fuck up a bit, you start putting on a bit of a show – you start following my advice – and whoomph!’ She made a hand gesture reminiscent of a flailing octopus. ‘You catch fire, my dear.’

‘I did not “put on a show”, Myranwe,’ Lilanile said, stiffly allowing herself to be led through the crowded bathhouse courtyard. It was an expensive and exclusive place in the Upper City with enamelled tiles and elaborate stucco. She’d barely gone up to the richer quarters until then; they made her homesick. ‘I performed as the Spirits moved me and my opponent demanded.’

‘Horseshit,’ Myranwe snapped, waving a dismissive hand. ‘Winning in this game is not about art, it’s about who you are. That’s why people come: to experience _you_. They pay to consume _you_. And if you’re talented but boring, well… If you’re only slightly talented and incredibly exciting, that’s another thing.’

There was a small knot of people, five men, sat in the corner on the stone benches under the colonnade. Myranwe leaned in and made a subtle gesture towards them. ‘Actually,’ she muttered, ‘I lied. Winning in this game is entirely dependent on who you know, sweetie. You won’t understand that because back home you already know all of them. Probably shared a tutor with them. But I’m telling you: those five specimens over there make or break a Hunter in Atatar. And now, finally, you’ve given me an excuse to introduce you.’

Lilanile studied them as Myranwe dragged her towards the shady corner and hailed the men. They stood up politely and bowed, and Myranwe introduced the tallest, thinnest, palest one. This, she announced proudly, was the Ordinator himself, the regulator of the Hunt in Atatar. And these were his associates, the Ordinator explained, gesturing to the nondescript characters beside him.

‘Now!’ Myranwe declared. ‘Don’t you just _love_ her hair?’ She grabbed hold of Lilanile’s upper arm and swung girlishly from it. Lilanile fought the urge to push Myranwe’s head into the pillar beside them. ‘It’s so severe. So different. So… old-fashioned, but in a good way.’

‘I am in mourning –' Lilanile began.

‘She’s in mourning,’ Myranwe butted in, ‘And I think that’s so old-fashioned in a good way too. Don’t you, Ordinator?’

‘Oh yes,’ he smiled absently. His companions rearranged the cushions so that she and Myranwe could join them. Lilanile instinctively disliked them all.

‘We go way back,’ Myranwe explained for the thousandth time as she fluttered to the ground like a demented bird. ‘Tell her the story, darling, please, it’s too good.’

‘Myranwe was my first client when I was an agent myself,’ the Ordinator explained. ‘Of course, I wasn’t the professional she is; I was only doing it to upset my dear old Ata, Spirits love him, and while I was waiting for a seat to come up in the Courts. It’s how I met these reprobates,’ he chuckled, turning to the other four men and clinking tea glasses with them. They all chuckled as well, then Myranwe chuckled loudly.

‘And then what happened?’ Lilanile asked.

The chuckling stopped, and the Ordinator looked up at her. ‘What do you mean?’

‘You said there was a stor…’ Lilanile felt her spirit fail and her mouth snap shut. She didn’t have the strength tonight.

‘Now,’ the Ordinator went on, recovering his poise, ‘Someone who has asked to see you very particularly, if it isn’t presumptuous of me, my dear?’

‘You can invite whoever you want.’

The man’s brow furrowed. ‘I was only…’

Lilanile was used to being the most important and the most feared person in the room, unless the room also happened to contain the Commander, the Aran or the senior Pelinia of Nenalata. She was used to people asking her permission to do all sorts of things. She was not used to that respect being performed as a courtly courtesy.

‘Allow me to introduce myself,’ the left-most man ventured. He was small and puffy and had a weak chin. ‘My name is Balen, and I am currently sitting on the Court Temporal,’ the man explained, fiddling with the hem of his tunic. The situation seemed to be causing him some embarrassment. ‘Things are… difficult in this city at the moment. There are several people vying for influence with the Aran’s Secretariat. I don’t know how things are done in Nenalata, but here it helps greatly to be popular among the lesser people, and the quickest way to their hearts is to put on free Hunts. My wife saw you today and came up with the idea that we sort of… unleash you on an unsuspecting public. You have a unique story, one that will cause a stir and fire up the crowd.’ He smiled wanly. ‘What do you say?’

‘How marvellous!’ Myranwe boomed. ‘How marvellous!’ she said again, turning to Lilanile and nudging her shoulder. ‘You’d be fighting in front of the Aran’s own people, you know, if Lord Balen here is the sponsor. Imagine that!’

Imagine that, Lilanile thought. It had to happen somehow for the Plan to work. In her mind and in the minds of her own Aran and his Commander it hadn’t involved some grubby political campaign, though.

There are people who think the most spiritually risky thing anyone can do is make some sort of deal with the Princes, Lilanile reflected as she sipped on her tea. But surely that pales in comparison with the deals we make with each other.

 

Menas killed a man one night soon after that. He had had little choice in the matter to begin with, and the Ayleid who called herself Calinden had given him even less. Still.

‘I keep thinking about his eyes,’ he whispered at the long lines of the woman’s shadow as she checked him over for concussions and wounds he was too shaken to notice. ‘I keep thinking about his eyes.’

In the gloaming her face was as blank and cold and pitiless as the Niben.

‘I keep thinking –' Menas sucked at the sticky night air for fear of what would happen if he didn’t. ‘I keep thinking “why me”? Why am I alive and the other man not? Why am I alive and my cousin…’ He heard the tremor in his voice and knew that he was going to topple over the edge. ‘Where is my cousin?’ he howled suddenly. ‘What did they do to him? Did he come here? I keep thinking “Dear gods, let him not have come here, because he’s not here in these pits so he’d be in the mines you told me about and I –"'

Menas’ voice stopped with an abrupt hiccup. The Ayleid had put a hand on his shoulder and his entire being had flooded with nothingness. His anguish was still there but he could only look at it, as detached as if it were a cloud in the sky.

‘Do you have a god of death, of the dead, of the underworld, Menas?’ she said quietly.

Menas was brought up short by the question. The gods were so many things; death seemed too small for any of them. ‘I… Death?’ The woman nodded. ‘Maybe Orkey. Maybe Shor. Maybe.’

‘Then meditate upon him or her, little Menas. Seek your answers where they may be found. I have none for you.’

She took her hand off of him and set about taking the worst of the bruising down on his knuckles. The emptiness remained however.

‘Who is your god of death, Calinden?’ he whispered to her.

‘I have no gods, Menas.’

 

Balen’s Hunt had been everything he and Myranwe had promised; loud, garish, well-publicised and a genuine battle of wit and skill. Lilanile's opponent had been a convict; a corrupt guard captain. She had heard that the Hunt could be a form of execution and was somehow heartened to find out this was true. It restored a little moral fibre to the whole thing, she felt. Taking place in the large gardens at the foot of the Upper City, it also showed her why it was called hunting and not merely slaughter. Finding him in the dense, lush groves was more like guerrilla warfare than brawling. She had resorted to some arcane tricks in the end, and that was surely what caught the Aran’s attention.

Lilanile made a great show of poverty when she went up to the Palace of Atatar. She had taken what was left of her winnings after Myranwe’s share and it just about bought enough coarse linen to make a traditional _varilie;_ the plain suit of shift, tunic and head shroud worn by those who had suffered unspeakable loss of any kind. In her case you could take your pick what that might be. It was a little dramatic perhaps, but piety might well prove to be both her sword and shield against Glinferen, she reasoned.

She rather liked the results. Austere, dignified, untouchable; these were all things she aspired to anyway.

‘I know who you are, of course,’ Aran Glinferen declared during yet another awkward silence. Lilanile was quite enjoying them. Hiding behind grief, modesty and reserve meant that he had to do the running.

She cast her eyes down yet again at the rich carpet beneath their feet. ‘My lord,’ she replied quietly.

Glinferen hadn’t been quite as she’d expected up close, but then neither was Aran Dynar or virtually any other person you normally first encounter on public display. She had found him in a long, open gallery above a rose garden, a silver platter balanced on a low table at his knees and an empty seat before him.

The Aran of Atatar was shorter than his cousin and considerably less trim. He had been fit once, though, and a reasonably good swordsman, and he retained strength if not agility. Lilanile was able to tell these things so quickly she’d have called them instinct, although it was thanks to long practice in the sparring ring.

‘I’m not talking about your performance in our grotty little pitfights, either, although I am of course impressed,’ Glinferen went on, leaning in to retrieve his cup of wine. It was red and silver, and around its rim ran a never-ending cavalcade of Pelini grappling Aurorans. From this distance it was unclear if they were fighting or fucking. ‘Unbeaten,’ the Aran observed, picking up another stuffed fig. Lilanile couldn’t help but let her eyes drift towards the slight bulge of his midriff and felt the first proper stab of homesickness so far. ‘That will draw attention to a person, and of course… You are somewhat notorious. But you’ll have known all that,’ he said with a smile. ‘So why here, Pelin Calinden of Morahame? Why now?’

Lilanile hadn’t heard her clan name for a while. It made her bristle, but not for the reasons the Aran would assume. She understood the question beneath the one he had asked; _what are you doing here in your enemy’s city? We are at war._

‘Forgive my bluntness but I am no longer a Pelin, your highness. You know that too. Please do not refer to me as such.’ Aran Glinferen inclined his head gracefully. ‘I came to your city seeking death.’

The Aran raised an eyebrow and chewed more slowly.

‘An honourable death,’ Lilanile went on. ‘A painful death, a warrior’s death, a pauper’s death, as was the custom of our Ancestors when… When in disgrace.’

Glinferen began to laugh; a deep, satisfied chuckle. Lilanile bowed her head even further forward until her linen shroud began to flop over her face: she didn’t want him to see her anger. She could see Glinferen’s knees flex as he reached out to pour them both more wine from the silver and red ewer on the low table between them. ‘Come,’ he insisted, pushing the cup under her nose. ‘I will drink to that: one of Dynar’s Pelinia seeking a painful death in Atatar. I will drink to that,’ he repeated. Lilanile took the cup off of him. She knocked it back in one and slammed it onto the tray.

Glinferen stared back at her with his cousin’s eyes but his father’s face; darker, broader at the chin and nose, a shadow of stubble though it was only mid-afternoon. ‘Oh Calinden,’ he sighed, shaking his head, ‘You are a work of art, are you not? Poised, honourable, brutal, disciplined… You are like something from a poem or a play.’ Lilanile could feel her face burning, and when he lifted her shroud off her hair with a careful fingertip she couldn’t help but welcome the breeze.

‘What if I was to say that I can offer you a thousand deaths, each more painful and honourable than the last?’ he whispered.

Lilanile’s stomach fluttered. It felt strange and childlike given what was happening. The plan was working; this was Phase Three.

‘I should say, your highness,’ she replied, whispering back, ‘That I want nothing so much in the Three Worlds.’ His hand was still on the nape of her neck, and she didn’t know what she was supposed to do about it.

‘Impress me, Lilanile Calinden of Morahame,’ said the Aran, ‘Please me. Give me no reason to doubt your prowess or your sincerity or your devotion to your cause. Don’t allow anything to distract you from it, not even me, and then we shall see what I can do with you.’

This had been the back-up plan, and it was good that it was falling into place as well: to join the Aran’s Pelinia provided a thousand more insidious opportunities to do away with him than the Hunt. Lilanile was now fairly sure that it would involve sleeping with him too, but that only multiplied the ways in which she might complete her mission.

‘If you survive your next fight, you will come here dressed for sparring practice. You and I shall go toe to toe, Pelin Calinden. I am eager to study your form.’

Looking back on it, this episode and the sense she made of it would prove to be Lilanile’s second big mistake.


	4. Phase Three

Menas came to understand the Calinden woman’s approach to grief. He wouldn’t have ever said he appreciated it, but as the days rolled by and the fights got tougher and his body got more tired and his heart became more bruised three things happened. The stakes kept rising; he became less and less able to think about them clearly; and he became more and more a thing other people looked at rather than a person who lived and ate and breathed from inside out. If he’d have stopped to think about any of it he’d have collapsed into a sunburnt heap in the middle of that pit and never got up again. The animal will to survive only takes you so far, he’d explain to the youngsters later in life: it’ll get you through one fight but it won’t get you through twenty. For that you need discipline and routine.

Calinden gave him that. Her visits were punctuation marks, her patching him up became a superstitious ritual. She had an even, forthright, confident voice; when she spoke she assumed she would be obeyed, and so she never shouted, bullied or cajoled. It took him the next month of running and fighting and slicing to realise that this wasn’t because she actually thought about things like that, but because she had been drilled into it to the point where she no longer did anything else.

But it worked. It worked. She spoke as if she could do anything and he believed her; she told him he could do anything and he believed that too. They were both still there, both still alive. She was still functioning – excelling – and so was he, doing things he never thought in his worst nightmares he could stand. The worse things got, the more he forgot his cynicism and just wanted to listen to that lilting, steady voice.

She understood how Menas both enjoyed and distrusted the way people had started looking at him. That was something they came to share: Menas and Lilanile Calinden were shadows on a wall that loomed large behind the people who cast them.

The one upside to that month’s misery was that Menas was now deemed too dangerous to house with the common slaves. He had been given his own pen, and that made it far easier for his bloody Ayleid angel to confer with him.

‘It’s almost like they give me a wide berth now. Might be imagining it, but…’ Menas gestured with the marsh grass he was chewing towards the high door to the walkway. ‘The boy won’t even look at me. Do you know, I sort of miss him?’

The Ayleid’s mouth did that thing where it twisted like a rope. ‘My advice is to pander to them, Menas. Vulgar though it is and absurd as it may feel. I am learning that the Hunt is all show, all childish games for childish minds.’

‘Don’t you do this back in your city, then?’

‘Of course not,’ she snapped. ‘We’re not beasts, not like these Atatache bastards.’ The Ayleid poked a gash in Menas’ arm angrily and he flinched. He’d never heard her swear before. ‘Look at them all, baying for your blood or my blood, slaves to their basest urges. There are powerful forces at work in our world, little Menas, more powerful than you will ever know. It is a fine line between being their master and being their slave.’

‘Hmmph,’ grunted Menas, ‘I was always told to keep well away from that stuff.’

‘This Hunt, as they call it, is a degeneracy. A decadence. To us, and to any honourable Ayleid, true glory is found only in a worthy adversary just as true love is found only in your equal. And it is better to die than live without love or honour!’

‘Pfft,’ sighed Menas, chucking his marsh grass away into the gutter. ‘If you say so.’

‘We aren’t all like this,’ the woman added. ‘There are other cities…’

Menas looked up at her again even though his eyes stung with the sun at her back like that. It had been an odd thing to say. The armour made her look like she had wings at her shoulders and talons on her fingers. Her outline wasn’t quite human anyway, but what she was wearing seemed designed to make her half-bird: half-eagle to be precise. At some point he was going to have to ask someone about that. For now, it was effective; he was unnerved.

‘I suppose I’m not going to get the chance to find out,’ he said.

 

Those mumbling morons in the Academy didn’t understand warfare, Lilanile decided. They spent their lives wittering about the known unknowns, they spent whole fitful, sunbaked afternoons lecturing her and her comrades about theories of risk in military strategy, but in the end it’s the unknown unknowns which ruin you. But then, she always thought, how can you even begin to think about those, let alone make a prosperous career writing treatises on them? Perhaps they could be forgiven, but only when she made it out of Atatar alive.

Becoming a successful Hunter to get close to Aran Glinferen had been a genius idea, and one which Lilanile was brilliantly suited to in all but one respect; a successful Hunter was a famous Hunter. No-one in Nenalata had reckoned on that, because they had no idea about how such things worked. A successful Hunter was invited to parties, bought expensive gifts they didn’t want or need and, it turned out, accosted by people they’d never met before as if they knew her intimately. She would be told what her favourite colour was by the patrons in the cookshop, she’d be told who she was sleeping with by the flaneurs in the baths.

It was becoming impossible for Lilanile to walk down the street. She was used to being highly visible in the Pelinia, of course, but really she and her comrades were all interchangeable with each other. No-one thought for a moment they knew her or that they were entitled to scream at her in the market place for something she allegedly said to someone she’d never heard of. But that had been exactly what had happened to Lilanile the evening after her third big sponsored Hunt, ending in raucous applause from the crowd around them. She had walked calmly to the gates into the public gardens, then she had run to a thicket and begun shaking uncontrollably, unable to fill her lungs.

Myranwe’s attitude to all this was delight, of course. Not only did it mean that Lilanile was getting booked for serious money but it also meant that Myranwe herself had become famous too, somehow. The worst thing Lilanile could do was beg to be let off the social functions.

‘Can you _please_ think about having an affair with someone?’ the agent pleaded as she prodded a sherbet. She had “popped by” Lilanile’s room to check she kept her afternoon engagement. ‘People love that: they love to have an opinion about your relationships.’

‘No.’ Lilanile carried on pulling on her lorica over her short, padded tunic. ‘I still don’t understand why Balen’s wife wants to meet me.’

‘I have no idea, darling, but do you have to wear _that_? You’re going to a party afterwards. She probably wants to introduce you to someone, I should think, as a bit of a novelty. She’ll be making the most of her connections with you: make the most of your connections with her.’

‘I am not going to a party afterward,’ Lilanile insisted, but she still found herself standing awkwardly in Balen’s courtyard garden half an hour later. It was full of bright, scented flowers, dancing fountains and one implausibly attractive young wife. So far no-one else had turned up, and Lilanile felt no need to make small talk with this minor aristocrat. She had gladly taken three cups of wine, however, and was feeling untroubled by the yawning silence between them.

‘My husband would have loved to have been here, of course, but…’ The woman flopped down on one of the overstuffed silk daybeds and fanned herself with a pamphlet of some kind. ‘He’s out watching my brother play in a ball game – did you used to play?’

‘I did,’ Lilanile said stiffly.

‘Well then,’ smiled the woman, stretching a delicate, soft foot out along the cushions, ‘You’ll know that he’ll be gone for hours.’ She rolled forward onto her front and her breasts jostled for space in the neckline of her dress. ‘Hours and hours and hours,’ she whispered, with a little giggle.

Through the wine Lilanile heard an obvious sigh come out of her mouth. ‘Are you trying to seduce me, ma’am?’

The wife threw her head back and a peal of laughter came from her lovely throat. ‘How gauche! Please! Don’t be so terribly serious. I just want to get to kno-’

Lilanile felt it her doom-driven duty to be serious, and that made her angry. ‘I should warn you it will not work. I am a daughter of a great and noble house. I am a warrior, the companion of a king, a Pelin. I am not a slave to be commanded at whim. I am not a performing animal.’

‘I beg to differ,’ the lady of the house hissed, the smile vanishing from her sweet lips. ‘You were these things and now I own you. I put up the money to have you in that fight and when you won it you owed everything to me. I made you and I can ruin you with one word.’

‘Ma’am,’ Lilanile said calmly, putting the cup of wine back on the tray and looking the young woman in the eye, ‘You do not own me. Your husband owns me. Just as he owns you. By all means play games with the lives of others but learn the rules first.’

 

Myranwe’s apartment was at the top of the tenement block and it had a trapdoor which gave access to the flat roof above. This was fortunate, because Lilanile had discovered early on that the lower people of an Ayleid city had no access to the large, quiet places you needed to perform traditional longsword figures. Her initial attempts to do her repetitions in her own sweaty little room had not gone well and aroused the wrath of all her neighbours, including the landlord himself. He had threatened her with eviction for it. That, and the constant assassination attempts.

Lilanile hadn’t regarded the lingering threat of extermination as unusual. In fact, in the Upper City a regular stream of assassins and some attrition among your household was a sort of badge of honour: it showed you mattered enough for someone to want you dead.

Still, it was better to keep one’s head down as far as possible. So she had taken to coming up to Myranwe’s roof to practice, and it was particularly her refuge at times of stress. Thus she went there after her afternoon with the magistrate’s wife, to meditate and swing her sword about a bit. Alas, Myranwe had followed her.

‘You did _what_?’ Myranwe screeched.

‘I told her the truth, nothing more, nothing less,’ Lilanile said without taking her eyes off the little votive figurine of the Lady of Light. She was hoping that Myranwe would take the hint and get out. ‘If a person cannot hear the truth then they should not act in defiance of it.’

‘If you’d stopped at just talking like a pompous arse maybe – maybe – I could salvage this but… You strangled her! Look what you have reduced me to!’ Myranwe brandished an untrustworthy-looking black bottle at her client. ‘You have driven me to drink!’

‘I did no such thing,’ Lilanile sulked, shutting her eyes again and restoring the ball of light to the space above her forehead. ‘I restrained her in self-defence.’

‘Who restrains someone by their neck?’ Myranwe wafted a hand at her protégé and stuck the other into a deep bucket of ice. She plopped a couple of shards of it into the green drink beside her and sucked it down like it was a particularly foul-tasting medicine. ‘You should be flattered,’ she muttered into the glass.

Lilanile rounded on her agent. ‘I am not a whore, Myranwe!’ she thundered.

Normally when she spoke to people like that they shrivelled into themselves. Myranwe simply stuck her hands on her hips and the silk drapes of her outfit fluttered like drunk butterflies. ‘Yes you are - sort of. We all are, darling, that’s the business. It’s the nature of what we do.’

A knock at the door broke Lilanile’s train of thoughts, which was fortunate since those thoughts would have led to Myranwe’s internal organs liquefying. A pale, gangly boy stuck his head around the door.

‘Sorry Madam Myranwe,’ he stuttered, ‘I know you’re busy, but… The landlord’s here. Wants the rent. And last month’s.’

‘Fine!’ shrieked the agent, throwing her hands to the heavens. Her wide silk sleeves flapped about her ears. ‘Fine! And why not just take every stitch upon my back while he’s at it?’ Lilanile frowned and turned back to her meditation. This could go on some time. ‘This… _sinister_ _reprobate_ has ruined me anyway. Let the vultures feast upon my broken bones! Things are going to get hot around here now, young lady, you mark my words!’

 

Dealing with the man they called Menas was not so easy. Lilanile had come to expect to tell him all aspects of her business and that he would offer no resistance or critique. Events had overcome them both, however, by the time she came to complaining about Myranwe and the magistrate’s wife.

‘So… You’re not a whore…’ the man said, scratching his neck with a knife he’d found somewhere, ‘But then you fucked _Glinferen_?’

‘I did not “fuck” the Aran of Atatar,’ Lilanile began. ‘He must believe me to be sincere. I inveigled my way into hi-'

‘The bloke whose blackened heart you’re supposed to bring back to the other bloke with the unpronounceable name?’ the man went on. ‘The most evil thing in the entire world, or whatever it is you said?’

‘I do not expect you to grasp how a false sense of compliance confers a strategic adva-'

‘- Advantage. I thought you’d say that; that’s why you said you were going to spar with him left-handed. You never mentioned humping. I may be naught but a poor goatherd, but I know whoring yourself is exchanging sex for something you want or need. So the difference between what you did with Glinferen and what you didn’t do with the saucy lady with the see-through dress was…?’

‘I do not come here seeking your approval or your advice, little man,’ Lilanile whispered with cool menace.

The man called Menas shrugged, and rubbed his swollen wrist. ‘I think he knows. I think Glinferen knows who you are and what you are and that you have to bonk him.’

Lilanile stuck her hand out and Menas’ neck collided with it. His eyes bulged with surprise and the pressure of his blood bouncing around his skull. ‘I know that he knows who I am. I know that he knows that I know I must behave as if sincerely interested in his advances, and I know that because I know that he knows that I am in fact the one who has the advantage, despite him believing himself to have the advantage, and for that reason my interest in his advances is sincere, but only because I know that he knows that I know that he is not correct.’

She leaned in even closer to the pink little man’s rapidly reddening face. ‘That is why it is arousing,’ she whispered menacingly.

‘I’m so confused!’ wheezed her captive. Lilanile thought she had made her point, however, and let the man drop from her grasp. It looked as if he’d run out of cheek, at least.

‘It’s a relief to know you only did it because you wanted to, though.’

The man’s cheek clearly knew no bounds.

‘Silence, little man!’

‘Because you could have just killed him right there and then and spared us both all this bollocks about varla stones and false identities and having to fight monsters. But you didn’t.’

‘For the last time: one does not simply murder an Ayleid King…’

‘So you keep saying. But you could have at least tried. You humped him instead. Well, at least one of us is having a good time, and you didn’t even need to compromise your high moral standards.’

‘Silence!’

 

Menas became aware that he was being followed not long after they gave him his own pen. Well, he wasn’t being followed because he never really went anywhere. But the two tall young Ayleids in the nice clothes were always in the crowd at the Hunt. They were always standing somewhere noticeable as he was taken through the streets. It was inevitable that they would eventually show up at the slave pits looking for him. Menas may not have been the bold and mighty warrior the posters promised, but he knew what it was like to have a couple of troublemakers making trouble for you.

Such things didn’t escape the warrior woman’s hawkish eye either. After a punch up with some kind of magical boar – Menas didn’t ask the details – she used their debrief-cum-triage session to reassure him.

‘If they threaten you – if they ask questions about anything at all – you will tell me, yes, little Menas?’ The woman gave him her most competent and level stare from beneath serious eyebrows. Menas felt the warm hug of her officer-grade steadiness and he knew she meant that she would make whoever he wanted die horribly. He nodded dumbly. ‘Good. Now: show me your wounds.’

‘Who are the Barsaebics?’ Menas asked while the Calinden woman did her best to take the gravel out of his shins.

The question made her stop, look up at him, then start doing whatever strange thing she was doing to his skin harder and with less care. Menas yelped in pain. ‘Where did you hear that word?’

‘The overseer, talking to that milksop boy of his. They seemed worried.’

‘As well they might be,’ the woman muttered, her muscles working like ship’s cables beneath her skin. ‘There is nothing so unreasonable as a zealot, little man.’

‘You said there’s a war on.’

The woman didn’t pause from what she was doing, but she raised one of her elegant eyebrows. ‘There has been a war on ever since I can remember, Menas, and I am much older than you are.’

‘So are you a Barsaebic, if you’re fighting the Atatache?’

For some reason the woman sat back on her haunches, let her head fall back and she laughed long and hard. Menas found himself thinking that her hair was very black and very beautiful, in a purely artistic sort of way.

‘No, little pink one! The Barsaebic Ayleidoon are…’ The woman smiled to herself wryly. ‘Some cities see the Spirits in certain ways that other cities currently disagree with.’ Menas opened his mouth to ask the obvious question, but the woman waved a lean, strong hand at him dismissively. ‘It is not worth asking why or what those beliefs are, because they are all wrong. The Barsaebic faction believes the likes of Glinferen keep dangerous company. I say you can keep any company you like so long as you never pay the bill. But my city has supported the Barsaebic cause anyway, and I abide by that.’

‘So does your Alan –'

‘Aran. _Ahrrrahn,’_ the Ayleid growled. ‘Aran.’

‘Does he, what, disagree with this Glinferen? Does he agree with the Barsabies?’

‘Barsaebics.’

‘With them?’

The Calinden woman drew her shoulders back and sucked a great lungful of air in through her sharp nose.

‘I wouldn’t go that far.’

‘So… Why has he pitched you all into this mess?’

‘It is complex.’ It was always complex. ‘Welke is a frontier town a mere eighty miles north-east of here. Across the Panther River.’ The woman drew a wavy line in the sand before her knees, then stubbed two points on either side of it. Menas assumed that was a map. ‘It has been much disputed since the Nineteenth Dynar married the last member of the House of Jorand. The current Aran Glinferen claims Welke: the heiress had been promised to his great-grandfather instead. My lord the Twenty Fifth Aran Dynar’s father believed neutrality to be the riskier course given the general instability of the Nibenay. Thus the Barsaebics.’

‘Ah! The old my-enemy’s-enemy thing.’

‘That is a gross over-simplification of the diplomatic situation.’

‘So how come he got the girl instead of the other Aran?’

‘You would sooner stand in the path of flowing lava than defy Proud and Warlike Nenalata. That House are renowned for their guile and charisma; even the Princes fear them.’ The woman shifted herself a little; it seemed she appreciated these special talents but had a vague inkling she probably shouldn’t. ‘The Dynar blood runs hot.’

‘Ah,’ said Menas, clarity dawning. ‘They’re randy, conniving bastards.’

‘You speak of my Aran, little man!’

‘I’m not saying it’s a bad thing. I admire it actually. If I were more than naught but a goatherd, I’d like to be renowned for my guile and my hot blood. But… basically you’re here because your King’s great-great-great grandfather poked a girl he shouldn’t?’

Calinden frowned harder and pored over his skin: it was mostly smooth again.

‘We’re here for what we’re always here for: to ensure that Nenalata emerges from the smouldering ruins of this conflict richer than when she went in.’

Eventually even an Ayleid has to talk straight. You just have to keep going at them long enough.

‘Say no more.’

Not for the last time in his life Menas decided that rather than join in, by far the wiser thing to do was to let the Ayleidoon just get on with squabbling, plotting, cursing and butchering one another. Then, when the storm had blown itself out, you’d have a much better sense of what the fuck a person was supposed to do about any of it.

 

‘What in Auri-El’s name do you think you’re doing?’

At first Lilanile thought she must be dreaming, because in her half-conscious state she swore she could hear the voice of the Aran of Nenalata.

‘In the name of every last one of the Ancestors get out of bed, Pelin, and pay attention!’

In the weak moonlight that had managed to make its way past the high tenements outside Lilanile could see the glowing contours of a strange half-bird, half-mer. It was exactly life-size but completely translucent. She was too well-disciplined to shriek or jump, but she dearly wanted to.

The projection of the living soul of Aran Dynar XXV of Nenalata was flickering at the foot of her narrow bed. She noted with trepidation that he had even gone to the trouble of putting on full battle regalia, hence the feathered shoulders. That could not bode well.

‘Sir,’ Lilanile slurred, struggling onto her elbows and trying to keep the sheets across her breasts, ‘This is too dangerous, sir.’

‘You’re damn right it’s dangerous! I’ll tell you what else it is: expensive. Both in coin and in varliance. I am nearly four hundred miles away, Pelin Calinden. Do you have any idea how close the varlais are to overloading?’

‘No sir.’

‘No sir! Do you have any idea what time in the morning it is, and how many Academicians I dragged from their beds to do this, just so we might – might – evade Glinferen’s wards?’

‘No sir.’ Lilanile genuinely had no clue what time it was.

‘No sir! Do you have any idea how indescribably dismayed I am that I should risk contacting you in the heart of enemy territory?’

‘No sir.’

‘No sir,’ the great general hissed. ‘ _No sir_. By my stars and my Ancestors, Pelin: what in the name of all the Princes is this?’

The shade held up a hand before its face. The forefingers and the thumb were pinched together but there was nothing between them.

‘Uh… I can’t see what you’re trying to show me, Arangua. There’s nothing there.’ The spectre blinked in confusion and turned whatever it was over to examine it. ‘Perhaps if you were to describe it…?’

That only seemed to further enrage Lilanile’s liege lord. ‘I blush to do so, Pelin. It is a handbill. It purports to advertise your next Hunt. The whole thing is unspeakably low anyway, but you would appear to be in an advanced state of undress!’

‘I know,’ Lilanile said sadly. ‘I pleaded with them, but it seems to be a standard image. I think they just sketch different heads on the same body. It’s quicker.’

‘You are a Pelin of Nenalata! You are dragging your name, your comrades’ names and my name through the sodden jungle swamp-mud of Atatar, Calinden!’

‘For the plan to work I need to be successful. This seems to go with success.’

‘No! This goes with self-indulgent preening, Pelin. Pandering to the mob. Populism.’

‘To be successful it seems one would also need to be popular, Arangua. And success in the Hunt is why I am here.’

‘Wrong again, Calinden: you are here because I have better things to do than fight this poxy war for the rest of my life!’ the spirit of the Aran of Nenalata bellowed at her. ‘Apart from anything else it’s obscenely expensive. The Arana harps on and on about founding temples this and dedicating libraries that. I won’t have a moment’s peace until I’ve raised some grotesque monument in her name. And I can’t do that until I have some disposable cash!’

‘And the peace of mind that your borders and your subjects are no longer threatened,’ Lilanile added quietly.

‘And that!’

‘Sir… With the greatest respect, none of us really understood what was entailed by my executing our plan. It may be undignified, but take comfort in the knowledge it is successful.’

‘There is such a thing as too much success, Calinden. If this goes on much longer, gets any noisier, I will find it impossible to reinstate you to your position when you return.’ The spectre flickered a little. ‘If you return.’

Lilanile hung her head. ‘Yes sir.’

 

‘You will next fight a summoned creature,’ the woman said in a matter-of-fact way as she laid her hands on Menas’ shattered thumb. It throbbed with an eldritch heat, but it felt better. It had been two and a half months since he and the Ayleid soldier had met, and Menas had just finished off an enormous but slow bruiser from somewhere so far north he’d never even heard of it. He was beginning to believe the myths about himself; that he never slept; that he had hunted bison with his bare hands in the Jeralls; that he had sharpened teeth. The Calinden woman’s comment reminded him that he was the opposite of supernatural.

‘I’m going to fight a what?’

The woman ignored Menas completely. She produced a little phial of medicinal-smelling liquid and tipped it into a linen rag. ‘Given what I know of Glinferen and the company he keeps, my guess is that it will be a Dremora, or perhaps a Xivilai.’

Menas grabbed the woman’s hand with his unbroken one. She looked up into his brown eyes. Seeing that his terror was genuine she sat back onto her haunches. It was her odd way of inviting questions.

‘I have no idea what either of those things even are, Calinden,’ Menas pleaded. ‘I have a broken thumb. I’m exhausted. I can’t do this!’

‘Little man,’ the Ayleid said quietly, ‘You can do this because you must, and because I am at your side. I am repairing your thumb. And you shall go into the arena armed with knowledge; Dremora are war-spirits in the service of the Lord of Destruction, Mehrunes Dagon.’

‘Oh Kyne’s tits,’ he whispered. ‘A war-spirit?’ Menas’ way of looking at the world didn’t really have war spirits in it. He just knew there were gods and there were demons. That sounded like a demon to him. ‘I thought that this was supposed to be the last thing I’d have to fight before they put me up against you? But that can’t be right; you aren’t worse than a demon.’

‘I am.’ She was deadly serious and eerily still. ‘I am far more dangerous than either the Kyn or the Xivilai.’ Menas gulped: somehow the air had disappeared from his lungs. ‘They fear me.’

Menas didn’t like to speak about what happened the following day; he subscribed to that old Kreath superstition that to speak of the Daedra is to summon them. But he could confirm that the Ayleid woman was right: they feared her alright.

 

‘I want to put a son in you,’ Glinferen announced the night after the man’s run-in with the Kynval. ‘Just imagine what he would be like!’ Just imagine, Lilanile thought to herself through her arcane exhaustion. ‘I can do that, Pelin: I can reverse what they did to you and give you a child. Would you like that?’

For a mistaken instant Lilanile thought this was a sincere request and it made her nerves fire with panic. Then her brain caught up with the rest of her and she realised it was just Glinferen’s arch way of calling her bluff and telling her he was getting bored of this.

Lilanile said yes, because what else exactly is one supposed to say in the Aran of Atatar’s palace, with him inside you and his hands around your throat? Glinferen liked to choke people, it turned out.

Lilanile wondered aloud what was wrong with the heir he did have. The Aran of Atatar spent the next half hour spread-eagled on his back decrying his disappointing and treacherous son. Lilanile spent that half hour watching his cock slowly droop and shrivel and thinking that there are some things that are the same in all places at all times. At least at home only the Commander had to listen to these post-coitus rants and at home there were no illegitimate offspring: Dynar had his faults but he had iron discipline. The Aran of Atatar didn’t like his legion of bastards any better than his son because they all kept trying to kill one another. Still, he reckoned, one of them would come good eventually. A son with her definitely would.

Don’t count on it, Lilanile thought as she sponged herself down and slipped into her clothes.

By my stars, you truly are a sadist, Glinferen, she muttered as she made her way unseen and unheard through the palace. You know exactly who I am, you know exactly what I am here for, and you know it would not take much to outmanoeuvre me. You just wanted to wave it in my face. Or force me into action. Well, I have been here too long anyway.

 

‘I am going to urge Myranwe to bring forward our engagement,’ the Calinden woman declared. She had appeared out of nowhere in the middle of the night, as a spectre, too, for the first time in over a month. This was not usual.

‘The day that you butcher me in front of a baying mob, you mean?’ Menas corrected her. ‘Do you mind if I ask why? Don’t you have all your elaborate preparations mundane and spiritual to make?’

The woman’s bronze lips formed a taut, downward curve like a bow. ‘It is a matter of expediency. Of one hazard balanced against another, and…’ It didn’t seem like she wanted to share her worries, and that made Menas nervous.

‘And…? I’m the other half of your plan. I know you don’t like it, but I have to know what’s going on in your half if I’m to do mine properly. We’ve spoken about this.’

The woman frowned even harder and stubbed her toe into the dusty earth of the exercise yard. ‘This place… My position in it… It is becoming… _Silly_.’

‘Silly?’ But the woman in practical armour was gone.

 

Calinden came back two days later and simply said, ‘Tomorrow.’

Menas felt the whole world – all his little pen – lurch to one side. He had started to tell himself that the day would never come. What he and this grisly soldier had was not much of a life, but it was all he had and he had learned how to cope with it. Change did not feel good. The sheer insanity of what she was about to ask of him felt even worse.

The Ayleid took one final glance around the bleak walls and up at the door to the walkway, then she reached into the breast of her lorica and fished out something on the end of a leather thong. She held it out to Menas, and he saw that her hand was shaking.

‘Take it,’ she whispered. ‘Keep it around your neck, next to your skin. Don’t let anyone see it.’

‘What…’ Menas reached out to touch the thing she had between her fingers. It appeared to be a simple cube about an inch square made of dull grey metal. There were no markings, no openings and no instructions, but when his skin touched it he knew somewhere in a part of him he didn’t have a name for that there was something terrifying inside.

‘As we discussed, Menas: as we agreed. When you are released into the Royal Park you run as fast as you can South-South-West: the sun will be at its peak, so judge your course by it. Run until you reach the perimeter wall, search for a varla stone high on the walls. Then open the box. That is all.’

‘But there isn’t –'

‘Tonight I shall pray to the Radiant Lady, patron of my city and of the House of Dynar, protectress of the souls of all things,’ the Calinden woman announced. Her profile was sharp against the light of the moons, and the sky above her was a sea of stars.

‘Fair do’s,’ Menas replied.

‘I suggest that you too pray to your own gods, in your own way, little pink one,’ the woman barked. ‘Though they are but shadows of the Spirits I know, they watch over you all the same. The night is long, the morning brings bloodshed, and war makes beasts of us all. You will need them tonight. Tomorrow... You go home.’

Menas reckoned he’d prefer to spend the night with a huge amount of beer and the private parts of the eager whores of the streets. He’d never actually met an eager whore of the streets, them being somewhat thin on the ground up in the pastures of the Colovian Highlands, but it sounded like the kind of thing you ought to try at least once.


	5. Phase Four

The next morning dawned grey and muggy, and through his sore eyes Menas could see the vicious Nibenay Valley sun struggling to pierce the marsh haze around him. He had thought at the point he started to hear the nightjars in the hours before dawn that he wouldn’t sleep, but the Overseer’s voice still came as a shock to him. He had woken up on the dirt floor, his limbs curled into his chest, his heart and that eldritch little cube.

Did that matter, he wondered? Was there anything that could get upset by the sky being overcast, some arcane detail that the Calinden woman hadn’t taken account of? It was only then it hit him how utterly dependent he and everything else was upon her, and he decided he didn’t like it after all. Even if she was totally sure of herself.

Then he remembered: the box and the wall. If he couldn’t get his bearings by the sun properly, how would he find the magic stone and the right bit of the wall? He felt a tide of bile rise up in his throat –

‘Up!’

The Overseer’s voice was right above him now. Menas tensed his muscles against a kick, but it never came. Instead the Overseer ordered him up again, but he didn’t have the usual sour sneer to his words. As Menas struggled to his feet, panicking at how badly his knees shook, the Overseer let him take his time. Once the two men were face to face, Menas was shocked by the look he was wearing.

‘I get rid of you at last,’ his fellow Colovian said, in that very Colovian way that said the opposite of what was meant. Menas’ gaoler of the last four months looked down at his feet suddenly and fiddled with his enormous bunch of the long, etched metal strips the Ayleids used as keys. ‘I never thought…’ the man began, then he glanced over his shoulder. Menas looked to see what had him worried, but there was nothing there.

‘I never thought I’d see a man take on that Pelin for the Aran,’ the Overseer muttered, making a big effort to have no expression at all. ‘I never thought it would be one of us.’

Menas supposed he meant a Colovian. Admiration seemed like a pointless thing to Menas now. He had wanted it all his life, but now he was about to do something worthy of it at last he realised it wasn’t going to make a shred of difference to him or anything. He would have told the Overseer that as well, but the look on the other man’s face was so sad, so hopeless and so hopeful all at the same time Menas realised there was no way he could argue with it. And so heroes are born.

‘Someone had to,’ he pointed out with a half-shrug.

The other brown-eyed man shook his head so slightly Menas could barely tell he was doing it. ‘No,’ he whispered. ‘Not a man, not anything I’ve ever seen in Nirn. You’ve not seen…’ He glanced over his shoulder again, and Menas felt the chill where the cube lay on his chest grow colder. ‘Locked in here… You’ve not seen what she’s done.’ The man looked back at Menas quickly. ‘But then I’d never have thought you could do what you’ve done. So I ‘spose anything’s possible.’

‘Yeah,’ Menas sighed, thinking just how true that was. ‘Anything’s possible.’

 

Lilanile Calinden of Morahame would have been lying if she was to say that she didn’t feel the old thrill rising in her heart as she was led to the pavilion.

She was used to marsh mists: they happened all the time in Nenalata and it only made her more homesick. She was glad in fact that the sun had finally burnt the haze off, leaving the Royal Park particularly perfumed, green and lush. Or the overwhelming richness of it all could simply have been that here she was, dressed in her full armour, seething with varliance and senses saturated by ritual tea and meditation, about to address an Aran and his consort and the highest nobility in the _stare_ of Atatar. She was about to draw blood with the Old Ways. It was more addictive and more dangerous than anything else she knew of.

She wasn’t actually too sure who everyone was or what they said to her, or what the Aran, richly but simply dressed, had quipped that made her and everyone else laugh. She wasn’t sure what the Arana of Atatar looked like, despite her interest in the famous beauty, and the Prince left no impression at all. In the end none of them mattered as people. They were bodies, units, pieces on the board.

It was like something from a dream. Perhaps she had actually dreamed of this, she reasoned. It felt so right, so inevitable and so familiar: perhaps that was the answer. She had been born to this; her stars had prefigured it; the Ancestors had arranged it; the Spirit of Nirn directed it. That was true anyway, regardless of any dream, but it would help explain why she wanted nothing but to act now, to do and to become. She took a long, deep, verdant lungful of park air to treasure as a memory.

‘Ah,’ Glinferen smiled, peering over the balustrade down to the broad sweep of the park below. Now she was up here in this little white-gold island above the cinnamon copse at its feet she could see that the whole vast enclosure had been landscaped so it could be seen from where they stood. It was tempting to simply shove Glinferen over the fretwork railing right there and then, futile as it would be. There was definitely something smug and conspiratorial about him today, even compared to his normal seditious smugness. ‘I see that your quarry has arrived.’

Lilanile could barely stop herself from laughing out loud with nervous exhilaration. She made do with a little harrumph. Glinferen turned back to her and – very quickly – winked at her. Lilanile knew there would be some counter-gambit, some hideous twist in the plot he had devised. No matter: she could meet any challenge he gave her and do it as she ran.

‘In that case, Calinden,’ the Ordinator said, touching her elbow, ‘Shall we retire? It isn’t done to see the quarry’s initial run.’ The Aran of Atatar and his Arana were flouncing their way over to their seats and the caterers were dishing out the sherbet already.

‘I would like a kiss.’

Everyone stopped. The Arana was the first to turn to her, spinning on the ball of her slippered feet so fast her skirts flew in all directions. Then the Prince wheeled round, one eyebrow raised. Everyone else in the pavilion also turned to Lilanile, and the Aran himself was almost the last.

Lilanile drew the dagger strapped along her belt at the small of her back. The six Pelini all drew their swords too, so quickly they and she almost moved as one. That’s good, thought Lilanile: I don’t know everything about how you fight and who you are, but I have at least a clue now. The Aran held out his hand to tell them to stay back.

‘Back home – in Nenalata – there is a custom that a Pelin seeking glory in her Aran’s name will have her blade blessed by him.’ Lilanile threw the dagger into the air and caught it by its blade. Then she offered its hilt to Glinferen. ‘I fight for my Aran’s glory once more today, Glinferen. And my own.’

Glinferen’s bluish eyes lit up with sly mirth, and he grabbed hold of the dagger with one of his burly hands. ‘I know you do, Calinden,’ he chuckled. ‘I know you do.’

‘Oh _Spirits_ ,’ the Prince sighed from behind his Ata. ‘The pesky bugger’s gone to ground. Someone go down there and rattle him a bit, yes?’

 

Menas ran. Menas ran harder and faster than he had ever done before. He ran desperately, crazily, towards anything that looked like cover, but the bushes were dense and many were covered in thorns. Above him the sun bleached his vision and the heat pressed down on him. Something buzzed in his head: a constant fuzz of voices from the walls above. He couldn’t think. There was nothing in his head. There was not one fucking thought in his fucking head. Nothing.

There was an endless instant where Menas stood just where he was and couldn’t move. He couldn’t even form an idea about what was going on. All there was was fear.

But the chill on his chest kept getting colder.

A quarter mile down a slope there was an open copse of trees, and it was further from that stark white tower above him. That could only be good. So Menas ran. If he could get away from the noise, or the sun or the heat or even just one of them perhaps the thoughts would come back.

Menas streaked like a mountain hare across the grass. The trees, the greenery, the smells: they terrified him and confused his senses after months of stone and dust. He felt his feet trip and his knees buckle again, and the crowd erupted into jeers, but he kept on running. Past stones and through stinging thickets and through culverts and a ditch. He only saw the trees. He only thought of the trees, coming closer, coming closer.

At last he felt them wrap themselves about him, and they drew him deep into somewhere cool and dark and lost.

 

Lilanile stood at the entrance to the enclosure watching the short, dun-haired man as he grew smaller. Every now and then he stumbled, and he was running the wrong way. Lilanile prayed that he wasn’t going to lose his wits now he only had one last task to do. As he ran – flung himself, really – into the copse she reassured herself that he had reserves of spirit even she admired and powerful motives: freedom and home. The same ones as hers.

Leave him, she decided. He will remember who he is and do his part. First you must do yours.

Instead of running after the Menas man she went left, towards the formal garden, towards the sculptures and the grotto and her urn.

 

The trees had done their job. They were a cool, dark world to themselves, and Menas would always say later that he could never smell pine sap after that without feeling relief. Somehow they shut out the crackle and roar of the spectators, too, and that helped him think.

He needed to find the sun. He needed to somehow get from wherever he was to the wall without the Ayleid woman having to kill him. That was what they were both here for, after all, and Menas knew they could only push things so far before suspicions were raised. The Calinden woman had told him that surprise was important to her plan working. He would have to try and avoid her, and he would have to try to avoid being seen at all.

He looked up at the sun: it had already moved from the height of the sky, so Menas knew he’d run slightly east of North. Before him was that white tower with the open room at the top: he supposed that was the King and the rest of the quality having a beer and a pie and waiting for the blood to spurt. The final piece of the puzzle was the Ayleid herself. Menas turned and edged towards the trees nearest the wide meadow. Back past where he’d come from he could see a tall, golden figure moving with unnaturally long strides towards something over the brow of the hill. It was Calinden, of course, and she seemed to sparkle in a way that seemed to have nothing to do with the sun.

Menas had decided that whatever it was that was flowing through that creepy sword and her creepy hawkish armour was flowing through the Calinden woman too. He had also decided that it probably wasn’t very good for the constitution. At least if her mental state was anything to go by.

She was already on her way to get the other half of her weapon, whatever in Oblivion that might be. He decided he had no desire to watch what she was about to do and he had ground to make up anyway. Crossing the pine copse again he turned his thoughts to how to get out of there, round the tower and over to the distant white walls. The trees had seemed like a good idea and they had done their job, but now he was trapped. Whoever had planted this enormous garden had decided that clumps of pine trees looked nicest on their own. It made no sense to Menas: up where these trees came from in the Highlands there’d have been scrub and rocks.

A sudden noise made Menas jump. He looked up towards where it had come from. On the walls he could see a breathless knot of liveried Ayleids waving their hands and pointing at him. No: pointing at the trees. Clearly they’d decided Menas was getting boring and the servants had been sent to make him interesting again. One of them ran off with great purpose, and Menas decided he couldn’t afford to find out what he was going to do to him.

Over to the near east of the Tower was a strange, lumpy expanse of flowering bushes the height of a man. They had big, bright flowers and looked dense but unthreatening. A small opening just on the right hand side might be a path, Menas reckoned. It wasn’t exactly good, but it was worth a shot.

He took a deep breath, told himself that he probably wasn’t going to die yet, and ran like the wind across the flower meadow towards the shrubs to the sound of wild cheering from the walls.

 

Where was the Menas creature, Lilanile muttered over and over to herself as she crouched inside an arbour at the end of a formal bed. She only had the faintest scent of him, and the wind was blowing it about, mingling it with the cinnamon and the rose garden. This was rapidly becoming less a matter of precision timing and more a matter of hopeful guessing and she didn’t like it.

A ripple of shouting voices from the walls to her right told her that Menas was on the move. Not only that, but he was skirting the pavilion and drawing level to her here in the hollow of the park. Beyond that there was the woodland, a too-perfect recreation of a Nibenay forest filled with every tree she’d heard of and some she hadn’t: all he had to do was clear another meadow and he’d be able to run for the walls freely. Once that final dash was underway, she knew that she had to be ready to move.

Lilanile raised her left arm and wriggled and shrugged until the skyglass shard dropped out. It was razor-sharp, and as it freed itself from the bottom of her manica it sliced into her flesh. She had picked up the uncharged varla stone that had enclosed it from a service store in the park gateway on her way in, and it had taken all her ingenuity to smash it without someone hearing. Now she drew her dagger from her belt, detached the blade with a practiced flick of something on its hilt and replaced it with the bloodied glass.

The path from the arbour was narrow and bordered with waving grasses and jewel-like flowers. Its line was interrupted twice. First it was broken by the urn where she knew the charge was waiting. She could feel her senses singing as the aetherial energies inside it roiled and swirled. A lot of heartbreak and a lot of sacrifice had gone into making that, and she hoped she could do justice to it today.

The second interruption marked the end of the path and the formal garden: Aran Glinferen’s pavilion.

Lilanile heard another roar from the walls rise and fall like a crashing wave, and she guessed that Menas had dared break his cover again to dash for the woodland. That meant she had nothing left to do but finish the job.

She flew to the urn, ripped its false lid off and plunged her glass dagger into the seething light inside.

 

Menas was not a woodsman. Too many trees made him as nervous as no trees at all, and now he was trying to run for his life through a lot of trees he knew exactly why. If you can’t run in a straight line, how are you supposed to know where you’re going? If there are that many leaves and branches, how are you supposed to keep the sun where it should be?

The walls hadn’t seemed too far away as he headed into the canopy, but now he felt as if he’d been running forever. His lungs felt like they were bleeding, his vision was jumping with every beat his heart took. But still the trees went on and on.

Then the air was sucked out of his lungs. There was a change in the weight of the air like after the first crack of thunder. A few long moments later he heard another churning sound from the walls, but this time it wasn’t jeering or laughter; it was a horrified sound, a terrified sound, a dumbstruck sound. Panicked himself, Menas wheeled around on the spot and craned his neck to find a gap in the trees.

He saw the white stone tower, he saw the deep blue Nibenay sky and – impossibly, horribly – he saw a tall, inhuman, golden figure running up the vertical walls of the tower. In its right hand it held an Ayleid longsword. In its left it held what Menas could only describe as a dagger made of the wrath of the Gods.

Menas knew that what was about to happen when the woman reached the top of the tower was something he would not be able to cope with, so he wheeled around and ran harder than ever. All the million thoughts that had been overwhelming him had disappeared like snow off a hillside, leaving only one. He wanted this to be over.

Behind him he could hear shouting, yelling, the clash of steel and stranger sounds like Nirn itself was crying.

The wall came up on him suddenly; he hadn’t seen it through his fear and the thick woods. Now all he had to do was wait for the sign the Calinden woman had promised and open his box. His fingers fumbled at the leather around his neck.

 

Lilanile was falling, falling through the air towards Glinferen. She had the dagger above her head and her longsword was out to her right, taking the Arana’s hamstrings with it as it moved through space and time.

He looked surprised, she thought. More than surprised: dismayed. No-one else seemed quite so surprised. Well, the Arana was surprised, but that was because her legs had stopped working. As she soared onwards, across the silk cushions, across the sherbet glasses, she thought how odd it was that sticking the dagger into Glinferen was the first thing she had to do here rather than the last. But it was the only logical course of action. None of this mattered unless he was dead, and if she got embroiled in combat with the Pelinia then he bought himself time to think. Surprise was her best advantage. And Glinferen was certainly surprised.

The blade disappeared into him like a knife in yoghurt: it was as if he had no bones at all. He looked down in disbelief at his breast, then up at her, and in the tiny moment between that happening and the six Pelini reaching her he said, ‘I thought he’d bribed you. I thought you’d taken the bribe.’

Lilanile felt a broad grin light up her face. ‘Someone took your money, Arangua, but it certainly wasn’t me.’ She pulled the dagger out of his body and blood and something heavier and darker began flowing from the wound. The Aran’s face began to shrivel as every one of his many years caught up with him at last. ‘Disloyalty is a terrible thing, no?’

Lilanile flipped up into the air. As she wheeled beneath the lace-like stucco in the pavilion roof she saw seven skysteel blades pierce the air where her body had been.

 

Menas had decided not to look, but he couldn’t help it. He saw the golden body disappearing into the open room at the top of the tower; he heard shouting and distant scuffling. Then there was some kind of exchange of blows, someone turned a somersault in mid-air, then the whole tower was lit up with a huge fiery explosion that came from nowhere Menas could work out.

Silhouetted against the unnatural yellow blaze he could see Calinden’s body flying upwards impossibly high. Her feet were unfurling in opposite directions as she twirled, and they collided with the jaws of two other shadows in feathered armour. She had that horrible lightning dagger between her teeth and in either hand she held an immense sword.

‘Two swords?’ Menas screamed out loud. ‘Really? Where in Nirn did the second one come from? What is going on?’

Calinden kept on spinning, and her two swords took the battered heads of the other Ayleid warriors clean off. Then they too were engulfed in flames.

‘Shor’s shit!’ roared Menas. But he turned to the wall and grabbed the little metal cube. He had no clue how to open it and no time to figure it out. There was nothing else he wanted now. Nothing else he wanted in all the world, but it was impossible. No, it had to be possible because she had said he must do it. He wanted nothing else in all the world but to get out of here. He wanted nothing else in all the world but for the cube to open. He wanted nothing else. Nothing else in all the world. Nothing else –

The little thing flew apart in his hands as if it had exploded, and another static charge ripped through the air around Menas’ body. An awful, writhing presence came spurting out toward the wall. Menas somehow knew looking back on it that it was sentient; it was a thing, a being. It was something’s soul, that much he could tell, although he couldn’t actually see it. It was churning in agony, desperate to break free, but something was compelling it toward the stone before him. Then the wall was gone. Or rather, he would later explain, it was both there and not there. It was still the wall, but somehow it was up to him whether he took it seriously or not. That was the best way to put it.

Still, there was no way in Nirn he was going to go anywhere near it without the Calinden woman.

 

Lilanile tore through the trees: literally. This was all a question of speed now. Good as she was there was no way she could fight the whole of the Atatar Pelinia and city guard. Flight was the only realistic option and, while it was by no means guaranteed success, she was cautiously optimistic.

As she crashed through the trunks and foliage, scattering splinters and hearing her pursuers cutting an even bigger hole in the woods behind her, she realised that she had succeeded. Her mission was a success. She had killed Glinferen, despite the odds. Her steps were lighter, her pathway through the endless trees more ruthless and precise. She had done it: it was a success. And she was going home in triumph.

 

The Calinden woman exploded out of the woodland before Menas with almost no warning. Seeing her felt like the second-best thing he’d ever known, after getting that cube to open.

‘Thank the gods!’ he shouted at her. ‘Thank Shor and than-'

Menas saw why the Ayleid woman hadn’t stopped to greet him now. Behind her he could see a great golden wave of metal, red silk and angry faces: the King’s bodyguard. Each and every one of them was a Calinden, he realised. Each and every last solder, and he only had one. Those weren’t good odds.

‘They’ve got us!’ Menas bellowed. Those gold and red bird-mer were only a few paces from them, their blades crackling and glowing in the gloom of the trees. ‘They’ve caught us! We’re fucked!’

Calinden had already stuck her sword arm under his shoulder and had hugged him to her body. Then he felt his feet leave the ground, and her feet leave the ground, and they both jumped straight through the wall.

On the other side a vast vista of green spread out before them like a carpet. Menas saw the sun, he saw the sky, he saw the endless forest and many miles off he saw a silver ribbon of river running through it. Then he looked down and saw nothing. He screamed again and gave himself up to the fall.

But they didn’t fall. Above him Menas heard a sound like a sword on a whetstone and he looked up to see Calinden’s free arm above them both. Although the sun was nearly blinding him he could see that she was using the metal talons on her gloves to dig into the stone itself. Them jumping through it must have broken whatever spell the cube had put it under and it was back to its normal state. They half-fell, half-slid their way down the sheer walls and the cliff below. It was still too fast, but it wasn’t deadly.

They both collapsed into the greenery and scrubby rocks at the foot of the drop. Menas rolled as best he could, and the Ayleid’s legs juddered beneath her. When he righted himself Menas could tell there was something wrong with her, and it took a while to realise that under her armour the woman’s shoulder looked as if it had moved several inches away from her chest.

‘Oh holy shit!’ screamed Menas. ‘Oh Kyne’s tits! Your arm! Look at your fucking –' But the woman was well aware of what had happened to her arm. Without blinking she grabbed hold of her wrist with her good hand. ‘Oh gods,’ said Menas, realising what she was about to do, ‘Oh fuck me, no… Don’t do th-'

The woman yanked her shoulder downwards. There was an unhappy, wet popping sound. The bad arm juddered forward, the strange bulge beneath the woman’s intensely practical armour disappeared, and the woman herself made a discrete and barely audible sound of pain.

‘Oh shit!’ Menas shrieked, and at the same time realised that they were now completely buggered. Her shoulder would be in agony, its muscles shredded. There was no way that she’d be able to…

The woman leaned down, gripped that hideous sword of hers with the injured hand and swung it up above her head experimentally. She nodded in approval at the results. Menas lay spread-eagled on the ground below her, too horrified and confused to speak.

‘Are you alright, little man?’ the Ayleid barked.

‘Am I…? Am I… Wha… Your arm!’

The Ayleid nodded again and took off past Menas. As she went she grabbed him by the front of his tunic and yelled, ‘Then we run!’

‘Your arm!’ Menas said as he scrambled to get his feet under him and keep pace with the woman.

‘I will have time for pain later, little man!’

 

Lilanile made for the Panther River. She mostly dragged Menas, since his short legs were frustratingly slow. She’d given him the dagger, just as she’d warned him she would do, and it was indeed a mercy to have a free hand since the other was always pulling him through something or over something else. She did consider dumping him, although she was ashamed to admit it, but she had instantly dismissed the thought. Cumbersome as he was, slow and frail and useless though he might be now, they had made an exchange, she and him. A deal, as he had called it. He and she were alike in so many ways, really: they both wanted to go home. They were bound together by their sedition in Atatar. And he had been essential to her a moment ago. It is better to die than live without love or honour, she muttered to herself as she sped onwards through the boggy, humid forest towards Welke.

Even she couldn’t kill the agony in her shoulder but it was at least functional. Spirits, though: she was going to have a debt to pay to her body when she got to the city. As mile after mile of cypress and strangler and fern sped past her, as Menas stumbled and slid and yelped beside her, as she sensed the Pelinia of Atatar coming up behind her, she fantasised wildly about bergamot tea and the bathhouse in Welke. Her feet moved even quicker.

 

The forest suddenly ended. Just like that. Menas crashed into the Calinden woman’s legs and scrabbled at them to see what had stopped her short.

Before them was the dancing light of the huge river, on three sides of them was the sheer drop of granite cliffs, and behind them was the hostile expanse of the Atatar forests.

‘And now, little pink one,’ rasped the Ayleid, ‘Now, we run in earnest!’

‘Run?’ Menas gasped, ‘Run where?!’

Before he knew what had happened to him he was falling, falling downwards, a hot, sharp hand at the nape of the neckband of his tunic. The world wobbled uncertainly, the skirts of the Ayleid’s armour and its silk sash flared out from behind his back, then he was dragged forward. He twisted in her grip, sliding across a surface that felt like oil but looked like water. It was hard to believe his eyes telling him that they were running across the river, out in the middle of it.

A ball of fire lobbed itself at Menas’ feet and erupted into a column of searing steam. He looked up to see that the red and gold soldiers were already at the cliffs they’d left behind. ‘Faster!’ he yelled up at Calinden. ‘Faster: please! They’ve found us!’

Something sharp and hard hit his ankles and the slippery, silvery water disappeared into the distance. They had reached the other shore, he realised. Calinden waited until the cover given by the trees was total, then she turned to their right, towards the north. She was making for that city that belonged to her King, Menas decided.

It was now or never, he realised: now or never.

 

Lilanile suddenly felt cold. Right at the core of her being was a chill that was absolute. In the heat of the forest and her exhaustion and her armour it made no sense. But there it was.

The chill spread. Her feet didn’t do what she wanted them to. This, too, was just like a dream, she thought. This was just like that dream she always had where she had to run and she couldn’t. Instead of seeing the forest flying past her she saw the ground come rushing up towards her eyes.

She felt the soil collide with her body. She smelled the rich hummus of the forest floor. She tried to roll over onto her back but there was something stopping her. She thought it might be a log or branch, but the sharp stabbing in her back didn’t go away when she shifted her weight. There was something lodged in her back instead.

She saw the Menas human’s pink face appear above her, and she saw that the dagger was no longer in his hand. She knew at that moment he had killed her. What she couldn’t understand was why, and it bewildered her. She had to know.

 

‘Why?’

Now he had done it Menas wished he could have taken it back. He hadn’t expected to care if he killed someone else after all the death of the last few months, but this was different. To see the proud woman’s impassive face twisted in pain like that, to tower over her instead of the other way round, it wasn’t like the others. He didn’t really hear her question. You are so beautiful, was all he could think. Not in the way that flowers or little birds are. In the way horses and storms are. Your unstoppable power is part of your beauty, and now I have killed you and taken it away.

‘Why?’ Calinden repeated, louder now.

‘They offered me a better deal.’

Now Menas said it out loud it didn’t sound like a good enough reason, even though he’d thought hard about it and he knew it was. The woman’s back was gushing blood and it was flooding the feathers of her armour, dripping onto the clammy leaves beneath her. The effort of holding her neck up became too much, and her black hair gently flopped onto the ground.

‘Who?’ she whispered.

‘He’s either the son or the cousin. One or the other: can’t remember which. Both offered me money, I reckoned it didn’t really matter which one I said yes to. Everyone’s fucked either way.’

The Calinden woman shut her eyes and laughed as best she could, but her eyes didn’t smile at all. ‘War makes beasts of us all… And what else? There’s always something else.’

‘They want your special weapon, your dagger. They said anything that could kill the King could kill you too. Anything that can kill you and kill Glinferen can kill King Dynar and everyone else.’

The woman’s pale eyes opened, but with great effort now. ‘You were no fixed point, were you?’ she said. ‘You were a moving part too, all along. Tell me your name,’ she gasped, stretching a wobbling hand out to grab Menas’ tunic. It left smears of blood on the fabric as it failed to find a purchase. ‘Not the name they gave you, your real name.’

‘My name is Menas,’ he insisted, ‘And I will never tell you my real name.’

The woman in practical armour’s eyes filled with tears, and coughed a wad of bile and blood into her mouth. ‘May you gaze upon the halls of your Ancestors once more, Menas,’ she whispered. Then, without any suggestion that it would be this breath rather than the last or the next, she died.

There was no home to go back to, of course. The village had been smouldering sticks and turf by the time he was dragged off behind that cart, and it hadn’t been much to look at even before the slavers got to it. What was the point in running away? Was he supposed to go and stare at his family’s beautiful bones? Starve to death in the snow, noble but free? No, there’s great virtue in being alive, as his old granny had kept on telling him. That’s why they’d slaughtered the pig each winter: not because they wanted it dead, but because they were going to survive.

Menas decided that he wouldn’t bring the dagger back after all. He threw it into the river as far as he could instead, and watched its vicious light disappear into the murky black water until it vanished completely. Nobody needed that awful thing, he reckoned. He’d make something up about it dying with her or whatever. Then he turned back towards where his gold was waiting for him. Beyond that, who knew? He’d heard they needed capable freemen up in that new temple city up north. Perhaps he’d try there.

Yes, he thought: there’s great virtue in being alive, and being taken out of that pit and out of that village and having something proper to eat and a roof over your head. So Menas he would be.


End file.
